At the Univerity of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Scientists unveiled their latest creation: a tiny wire, 4 phosphorous atoms in height and width, with a capacity to conduct electricity on par with copper wires.

As technology continues to advance, computer components like processors, wires, and RAM is constantly shrinking. This progress resulted in smaller computers and gadgets due to, more powerful processors. It was only a decade ago that we are operating with processors with a single core. Now it is normally composed of four cores, making true multiprocessing possible.

The nanowire was created by scientists by scanning tunneling microscopy. Think of it like a nanoscale tunneling operation where they drill a hole in a silicon crystal. The tunnel is then lined with chains of phosphorous atoms to provide the electrons. The whole construct is the wire and it is insulated by the silicon, solving the problem of laying nanowires to each other which just results to electricity conducting to adjacent wires instead of making a circuit.

The wire itself is measured in nanoscale is 20 times smaller than the smallest wire available commercially. With its size, it was expected to behave along the rules of quantum mechanics but is found to still follow the Ohm's law, which states that the resistance of a wire increases with its length. The wire behaves like any normal piece of wire. Scientists predicted that in Nanoscale, wires would be subjected into superposition of states because of quantum coherence. Simply put, electricity might go through the positive to negative and negative to positive at the same time due to the wires being polarized both ways. This would be ideal as it would make the capacity of a wire double the capacity for data by not relying on binary information, meaning that the wire is on or off. Think of a one way street being turned two way, only that the street is still one street wide but the cars just pass each other like ghosts. This would effectively make processors not only twice as powerful because of the smaller size but multiplied by two again because it just doubled its capacity. Unfortunately, the wire behaved just like a normal wire.

While it looks like scientists have ways to go before achieving quantum computing, they have successfully made smaller components that not only lowers the material requirements for faster, more powerful computers. David Ferry of Arizona State in Tempe states that quantum computers rely on quantum coherence. The results of this discovery may have just made quantum computers a few more steps farther away.