A research group led by graduate student Yeelai Chew, Assistant Professor Sylvain de Léséleuc and Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, is using atoms cooled to almost absolute zero and trapped in optical tweezers separated by a micron or so (see Fig. 1). By manipulating the atoms with a special laser light for 10 picoseconds, they succeeded in executing the world's fastest two-qubit gate, a fundamental operation essential for quantum computing, which operates in just 6.5 nanoseconds.
