Mikhail Lukin's group at Harvard, supported by one Texan physicist and one German physicist, has made some progress in a new technological approach to quantum computing. The qubits are nuclear spins of carbon-13 atom inside a diamond. They are manipulated by the spin of a nearby electron controlled by LASERs. The electronic spin is a new degree of freedom that occurs inside a nitrogen vacancy - a place where one nitrogen atom replaces one carbon atom. See
This technology offers a remarkably long decoherence time and a possibility of a large number of qubits that can be manipulated with in a correlated fashion. If things go really well, you will be able to buy a diamond on the picture above that can break all codes in the world by Christmas 2007 but Easter 2077 is somewhat more realistic. ;-)ZDNET
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A PhD thesis (focus on chapters 2,3)
