WELLINGTON: The Radio of New Zealand reported on Monday, scientists from New Zealand’s University of Otago have developed a technique to not only isolate and capture a single atom consistently, but to “see” and photograph this atom.

It is a major step toward building ultra-fast quantum computers and their work has been published in the scientific journal Nature Physics. It starts dramatically slowing down a cloud of about 10,000 atoms in a vacuum chamber; the whole process takes a fraction of second to get completed.

A laser beam is then all set to hold around 50 atoms. Finally, leaving a lone atom, light from another laser at a particular frequency causes the atoms to repel each other. The structure of a single atom is so small, as it has been estimated that 10 billion of them side-by-side would stretch a meter in length in its overall configuration.

The quantum computer of the future which needs about 20 or 30 separate atoms at the one time and it has been predicted that these computers are so fast that they have been likened to be a supercomputer on steroids. Other groups have also seen and photographed neutral atoms before around the world, but till date, none of them have done it so consistently.