Leggi questo articolo ad alta voce
Attiva il microfono e leggi con il tuo ritmo. Le parole si illuminano mentre procedi, e nulla ti ferma quando una viene pronunciata male.
Il tuo audio non arriva mai a MovaReader: a riconoscerlo è il tuo browser. Informativa sulla privacy
Accedi per conservare questa sessione nella cronologia delle letture.
The Cold Chip
Leo wanted a plain answer. A headline had said quantum computers would break the locks on ordinary encrypted mail. His sister Imani worked with a research group, and he wanted to know whether that break had already happened. He took the train to the lab and stood beside a white cylinder that hummed.
Inside it, a small chip sat in the cold. This kind of quantum computer uses superconducting circuits, and those circuits have to stay near absolute zero. A classical bit is zero or one. A qubit on that chip can be held in superposition, a mix of zero and one, until the machine measures it. Imani said the state is easy to lose. Heat, a shake, or a stray signal can knock it apart. People call that decoherence. The cylinder was there to keep the world out.