Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers. A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales. In a quantum computer data is not processed by electrons passing through transistors, as is the case in today’s computers, but by caged atoms known as quantum bits or Qubits. “It is a new paradigm for computation,” said Professor Artur Ekert of the University of Oxford. “It’s doing computation differently.”