LOS ANGELES, April 25(Xinhuanet)-- US scientists said on Monday that they have taken a step forward in the development of a powerful new generation of computers, the quantum computer.

By making tiny holes that contain nothing at all, the researchers successfully designed a chip with a top surface of laser light that functions as an array of tiny traps, which could one day cradle atoms for quantum computing.

Worldwide, scientists are racing to develop computers that exploit the quantum mechanical properties of atoms, said Greg Lafyatis, associate professor of physics at Ohio State University who led this new study. Their work has been published in the journal Physical Review A.

The so-called quantum computers could enable much faster computing than is possible today. One strategy for making quantum computers involves packaging individual atoms on a chip so that laser beams can read quantum data.

Each of the tiny traps could potentially hold a single atom. The design could enable quantum data to be read the same way CDs are read today.

The Ohio researchers have been able to form about a billion gaseous rubidium atoms into a pea-sized cloud with magnetic fields.Now they are working to move that cloud into position above a chipsupporting the optical lattice. Theoretically, if they release theatoms above the chip in just the right way, the atoms will fall into the traps.

Other research teams have created similar arrays, called optical lattices, but those designs lock atoms into a multi-layered cube floating in free space. Manipulating atoms in the center of the cube would be difficult, making them hard to use in practice.

The Ohio State lattice has a more practical design, with a single layer of atoms grounded just above a glass chip. Each atom could be manipulated directly with a single laser beam.

The lattice forms where two sets of laser beams cross inside a thin transparent coating on the chip. The beams interfere with each other to create a grid of peaks and valleys, the egg carton-shaped pattern of light.

The physicists did not expect to see that much when they first modeled their lattice design on the computer. But to their surprise, the simulations showed that each valley contained a darkspot, a tiny empty sphere surrounded by electric fields that seemed ideally suited for trapping single atoms and holding them in place, Lafyatis said.

The next step is to see if the traps actually work as the modelpredicts. But a working computer based on the design is many yearsaway, he cautioned.

The traditional chips are expected to reach their technologicalspeed limit in a decade or so, and faster, more powerful computerswill require a new kind of hardware when that happens.

A"bit" in normal computer chips can only encode data as eithera one or a zero. But according to the quantum theory, quantum bitsor qubits will enable more efficient problem-solving because a qubit can simultaneously encode both a zero and a one.

This allows the quantum computer to efficiently carry out a large number of calculations simultaneously.

"In principle, quantum computers would need only 10,000 qubits to outperform today's state-of-the-art computers with billions andbillions of regular bits," Lafyatis said. Enditem