Quantum Computers Could Soon Talk to Each Other Using Sound

A phonon is absurdly small. The quantum of vibrational energy, the irreducible minimum of sound, it carries no mass and lives only briefly before dissolving back into the thermal noise of whatever material surrounds it. For quantum engineers trying to build the next generation of computing hardware, that brevity has long been the problem. You cannot build an information highway out of something that barely exists. And yet a team at Harvard has just demonstrated that a single phonon, one...