There is progress to precisely placing silicon atoms to create qubits for quantum computers.
The Kane quantum computer is a proposal for a scalable quantum computer proposed by Bruce Kane in 1998 who was then at the University of New South Wales. Often thought of as a hybrid between quantum dot and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum computers, the Kane computer is based on an array of individual phosphorus donor atoms embedded in a pure silicon lattice. Both the nuclear spins of the donors and the spins of the donor electrons participate in the computation.
Unlike many quantum computation schemes, the Kane quantum computer is in principle scalable to an arbitrary number of qubits. This is possible because qubits may be individually addressed by electrical means.
Since Kane’s proposal, under the guidance of Robert Clark and now Michelle Simmons, pursuing realization of the Kane quantum computer has become the primary quantum computing effort in Australia. Theorists have put forward a number of proposals for improved readout. Experimentally, atomic-precision deposition of phosphorus atoms has been achieved using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) technique in 2003. Detection of the movement of single electrons between small, dense clusters of phosphorus donors has also been achieved. The group remains optimistic that a practical large-scale quantum computer can be built. Other groups believe that the idea needs to be modified.
In 2020, Andrea Morello and others demonstrated that an antimony nucleus (with eight spin states) embedded in silicon could be controlled using an electric field, rather than a magnetic field.
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I’m one of those people who believe biological systems (and our brains) operate at some levels at the quantum level* We think of “quantum events” happening only at very low temptress and in ways we know only as 1’s and 0’s. I know life does not follow our rules. Not even close. So if we want to design quantum computers, lets look at our brains. Not very fast, but unimaginably robust. * Book: “Life On The Edge”. The coming age of quantum biology. Authors: Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili. Crown publisher’s New York, USA. Copyright: 2014. ISBN: 978-0-307-98681-8 eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-98683-2
Honestly, if you want a book that will blow your mind (in a nice way), read this.
I’ve never seen any evidence of it, if by “it” you mean biology relying significantly on superposition/entanglement in the way quantum computation does. Quantum computation at room temperature would be ridiculously hard, since maintaining coherence long enough to perform even one operation would be basically impossible.
It’s, “Consciousness is spooky, quantum things are spooky, so consciousness must be quantum” reasoning of the sort Penrose used to be guilty of.
That said, of course biology is unavoidable based on quantum physics, in the sense that atoms and molecules aren’t even stable under classical physics, and a lot of biological reactions rely on tunneling between states. But in that sense everything small is quantum, classical physics only looks like a good approximation of the world at a human scale, it completely falls apart if you look at tiny stuff.