For the first time, researchers have been able to control the remarkable ability of an electron to exist in two places at once and that too in the most common electronic material, silicon-a feat that could mark a big leap towards affordable “quantum computer”.

Scientists in the UK-Dutch team from the University of Surrey, UCL (University College) London, Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics near Utrecht, accomplished the above breakthrough.

According to the study, they have created a simple version of Schrodinger’s cat – which is paradoxically simultaneously both dead and alive – in the cheap and simple material out of which ordinary computer chips are made.

Continue reading Silicon Breakthrough Brings ‘Quantum Computer’ Closer to Reality