Shoot an atom into silicon, and you may have the beginnings of a quantum computer

Take one atom of the element antimony, use an ion beam to shoot it into a silicon substrate, and you just may be on your way to building a working quantum computer.

That's according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, who announced this week that they've used that technique with promising results.

In their experiment, described in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers used an ion beam generator to insert the antimony atom into an industry-standard silicon substrate -- a process that took just microseconds. That atom, equipped with five electrons, carries one more than a silicon atom does. Because electrons pair up, the odd antimony electron remains free.

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