The Morning Briefing: Quantum computing

"The Morning Briefing" is SmartPlanet's daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we're reading about quantum computing.

1.) Scientific breakthrough: Researchers photograph shadow of a single atom. Such experiments help confirm our understanding of atomic physics and may be useful for quantum computing.

2.) Researchers create room-temperature quantum bits that store data for nearly two seconds. It's a challenge that's long been one of the holy grails of quantum computing: how to create the key building blocks known as quantum bits that exist in a solid-state system at room temperature.

3.) How quantum computing will change security. The time it would take a traditional computer to crack the encryption of a network would be so long the network would have already changed its password and any data gained from previous communications would be too old to be worth anything.

4.) Raytheon wins funding under quantum computer program. Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded $2.2m (£1.4m) in funding under the Quantum Computer Science programme sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

5.) CCNY, UC Berkeley develop lasers that could rewrite quantum chips, spin those atoms right round. The City College of New York and University of California Berkeley have jointly developed a technique that could speed along quantum computing.

Image credit: Flickr

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com