Qubits, the strange devices at the heart of a quantum computer that can be set to 0, 1, or both at once, could hardly be more different from the mechanical clockwork used in the earliest computers. Today, most quantum computers rely on qubits made out of tiny circuits of superconducting metal, individual ions, photons, or other things. But now, physicists have made a working qubit from a tiny, moving machine, an advance that echoes back to the early 20th century when the first computers employed mechanical switches. “For many years, people were thinking it would be impossible to make a qubit from a mechanical system,” says Adrian Bachtold, a condensed matter physicist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences who was not involved in the work, published today in Science. Stephan Dürr, a quantum physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, says the result “puts a new system on the map,” which could be used in other experiments—and perhaps to probe the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity. A qubit can be any system that has two quantum states of different energies that can be isolated from all of its other states. For example, a superconducting qubit is a circuit that sloshes with unquenchable current and has a lower energy state representing 0 and a higher energy state representing 1. Applying microwaves of the right frequency, researchers can ease it into one state or the other, or any combination of two.

Full report : Researchers use Sapphire crystal’s vibrations to make two-ways-at-once quantum bit.