A team of researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology recently sent a message unlike any other in history. The sender and receiver were single atoms, and the " message " was a single photon transferred between the two via a 100-meter fiber optic strand. The tiny scale of the exchange has big implications for quantum computing.

Quantum computing takes advantage of the peculiar properties of quantum particles to solve problems exponentially faster and store exponentially more data than conventional computers. " A quantum computer would allow us to solve some very big physics problems, " says Dr Winfried Hensinger, Lecturer in Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics at the University of Sussex. " It will have a huge impact on areas such as chemistry and in understanding nature as we know it. It will revolutionize all of science. "

But although the principles of quantum computing are well understood, actual construction of a quantum computer has been slow to materialize; researchers at IBM, for example, have succeeded in constructing only a seven-particle model. The Georgia Tech team' s success at the quantum level, however, brings the reality of quantum computing a big step closer. "The controlled transfer of single quanta between remote quantum memories is an important step toward distributed quantum networks," says Alex Kuzmich, the Cullen-Peck Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "But this is still a building block. It will take a lot of steps and several more years for this to happen in a practical way." more @ nanotechwire.com