Several months ago, researchers were testing microwaves in quantum computers to make it a more practical option commercially. Now, one Ph.D. candidate named Brent Weber has developed a silicon wire with the help of his supervisor Professor Michelle Simmons and University of Melbourne and Purdue researchers. This development is far more promising than microwave testing and might have IT professionals considering how to apply quantum computers once these are available--one consideration is big data.

Atomic Silicon Wires

The wires are four atoms wide and one atom tall. To put this in perspective if you don't have a grasp on the size of an atom, these wires are "10,000 times smaller than a strand of human hair." Yet Weber proved that conductivity was not compromised with width. Certainly, this can affect technology already in use, but since quantum computing needs the most development, the implications are most revolutionary here. The researchers created the wire with "scanning tunnelling microscopy," letting them link phosphorous atoms in a silicon crystal, according to Smart Planet. Weber notes how amazing it is to find Moore's law still applies even when you break it down to the atomic level.

IT Applications

It's noted that the practical quantum computer is still at least a decade away, but this is a much brighter estimation than even a few months ago. If developments are exponential, you might be able to expect the practical application of these far sooner than we expect now. That being said, consider the major advantage of quantum computing. As discussed in an earlier Infoboom article, these are capable of much higher information-processing speeds when you properly leverage its potential with specialized algorithms and languages. The first thoughts are how phenomenal it would be for encryption and decryption, but there's another emerging topic in IT--big data.

Big data's meaningfulness is relatively new. But as a senior IT professional, you've been around enough to know that it's essentially a pool of data in your business's infrastructure--for example, end-user data. Industry analysts have gleaned that you can sift through relevant data to find market trends and other useful patterns. With current computers, you can write a program to do preliminary analyses for you, but with properly programmed quantum computers, you could do that exponentially faster. This is probably not something that small businesses will concern themselves with, at least not at first--but as you break the threshold into midsize and eventually, to large, such a tool could be tremendously beneficial. This is just one possible application in which quantum computers can revolutionize IT for all. And who knows? It might only be a few years before you have one in your business.