ONE of the obstacles to quantum computing turns out to be not quite as daunting as was thought.
Quantum computers require particles such as electrons to be entangled, a special state in which what happens to one particle of a pair affects the other. But if the electrons being used in a computation become entangled with other electrons nearby, information can leak out in a process known as decoherence.
Decoherence can be triggered by stray magnetic fields produced by the movement of electrons within atoms of the material being used, and it had been thought that the best way to…
