Princeton University and UC Santa Barbara scientists have succeeded in trapping one or two individual electrons to form spin qubits (quantum bits), allowing the electrons to behave quantum-mechanically for a long period of time.

Previous experiments affected all the electrons uniformly in their immediate surroundings and were slow. The new method allows for extremely fast quantum operations in the nanosecond domain and overcomes a major hurdle in the quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer.