BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of pairs of dancing atoms suspended in laser light are the building blocks of what some day may become a powerful quantum computer able to solve problems in seconds that take today's fastest computers years to crack, U.S. physicists said Wednesday.

"You can do the equivalent of multiple classical calculations at the same time in the quantum world," said Trey Porto, a researcher with the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose work appears in the journal Nature.

Porto and colleagues have persuaded pairs of super-cold rubidium atoms to repeatedly swap positions, a feat that could make them useful for storing and processing data in quantum computers.

In today's computers, the smallest unit of storage is a binary digit or bit, which can only have two values ¢w zero or one. These form the basis of information storage in digital computing. When combined into groups of eight on a typical PC, these bits become bytes.

"In the quantum world, instead of just the possibilities of zeros and ones, you have a range of possibilities," Porto said in a telephone interview.

Quantum bits or qubits can also oscillate between the zero and one positions, like a half-flipped light switch. This flexibility could allow for many calculations to be carried out simultaneously, Porto said.

Porto's team isolated pairs of atoms in a lattice of light formed by six laser beams all fixed on one point, suspending the atoms in a uniform pattern. "There is no container. It is levitated by the laser beams."

So far, all the pairs are doing the same dance. To be useful in a quantum computer, he and his team will need to figure out how to get different pairs to dance and spin independent of the neighboring atom pairs.

(Agencies)