Superconducting Applications in Quantum Computation

Superconducting materials could potentially be used to implement a quantum computer, a device that utilizes quantum mechanical properties to produce significantly more powerful processors than we could possibly create in a classical computer. Typically, classical computers are composed of macroscopic integrated circuits made of semi-conducting materials, which are limited by classical mechanics. A quantum computer would be capable of accessing bit states unavailable to classical bits, making them exponentially more powerful.

Background

Computers perform computations using bits, a fundamental unit of information that is either in the state 1 or 0. One bit may not be particularly powerful but many bits can hold a lot of information; a string of n bits can be in any one of 2^n states.