A team of Austrian physicists broke their own record by creating a 20-bit register for a quantum computer. The previous record was set in 2011, when physicists from the Reiner Blatt laboratory (Rainer Blatt) at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) for the first time combined 14 individually addressable qubits.
Quantum qubits are the basic building blocks of quantum computation, just as bits are the building blocks of traditional computation. To create a quantum computer requires a complex system of quantum "entangled" particles, which are inextricably linked to each other.
Now Rainer Blatt and his team of physicists have created a system of 20 qubits whose quantum States can be controlled individually. In the experiment, 20 charged calcium atoms located on the line served as qubits. They managed to link together ("confuse") with a laser. Regular bits can exist in two States — 1 or 0. Qubits can exist in a superposition of both States, and this can make the computer much faster and more powerful than it is today.
Scientists believe that using their technique, they can increase the number of quantum registers. While physicists set a goal to obtain a 50-bit register. According to Rainer Blatt, this achievement can help us solve problems that even the best computers are not available today.
