This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Computers transmit information in bits, zeros and ones, off or on.

But in quantum computers, that off on logic becomes a little more flexible

because the bits in quantum computing called quantum bits or cubits can actually be zero

and one at the same time. Think of it like this. A coin

flipping through the air can be considered to be both heads and tails before it

lands. In that way it's like a cubit. Until you measure it, the cubit is zero and one.

Just as until the coin lands, it's both heads and tails.

But the quantum weirdness goes beyond simple cubits, because physicists have also created pairs of photons, particles of light, called quidits, with a d, for multiple dimensions.

And those dimensions are different colors of light.

So instead of being just zero and one,

like a regular quantum bit, these photon cutits

are, for example, simultaneously pink and purple and red and orange. In fact they can come in as many as

ten different colors which mathematically means ten different dimensions

compared to the two dimensions of a cubit.

Again, if that sounds crazy, just think of a ten-sided dye

spinning through the air instead of a two-sided coin.

It's all ten sides at once.

The study is in the journal Nature. The big advantage of quantum

bits and the point of developing them at all is they contain more information

than a classical bit, meaning quantum computers can use them in theory to solve super complicated equations much faster than a normal computer could and

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