As the technology advances towards ever smaller and more powerful computers, it has been the duty of this office to submit reports on various occasions on the many different systems that exist to provide faster, more powerful machines.

But with every advance, the systems get ever closer to reaching a limit they may not get passed. For as these systems shrink in size, their very natures and descriptions must be referred to in quantum mechanical terms.

Now while various ‘theoretical’ considerations have been made with regard to how such machines could be built, not to mention what materials would be used. But first one must accept quantum mechanics itself, and the strange fact of wave-particle duality.

In simplest terms, small systems such as atoms can exist only in discrete energy states; Any outside influence can cause this state to change, when this happens an atom absorbs or emits energy in exact amounts in the form of photons [that which makes up light waves].

It is these waves that when ‘superposed’, two waves acting as one [and thus being coherent], or in loss of steady state become decoherent, that provide the basis for information storage.

For a ‘bit’ of information is simply a distinction between two alternatives, no or yes, 1 or 0, etc.. One possible component of a quantum mechanical computer is the hydrogen atom. Because hydrogen atoms can be ‘excited’ [this done with a laser], logic gates could be created to represent these different states [i.e.: not, copy, and…].

Even salt crystals possess the possibility of being a component in a quantum mechanical computer. This because they can carry out the ‘Double Resonance’ operations simultaneously, and do so in all directions.

The possibilities are staggering, for both good and bad. But whether or not quantum machines go from ‘theory’ to reality still is being debated. Many obstacles will need to be over come, such as error correction, and storage if the ‘next generation’ of machines are to be quantum ones.