ADD salt to your chips and you could end up with a quantum computer—as long as your chips are made of silicon rather than spuds. The trick sidesteps many of the difficulties involved in manipulating lone atoms to make quantum processors.
Quantum computers are devices that aim to harness the strange quantum properties of atoms or electrons to generate vast processing power. One proposed design involves phosphorus atoms buried in a sliver of silicon with electrodes placed above each atom (New Scientist, 24 June 2000, p 36). The nucleus of each atom has either a clockwise or anticlockwise…
