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Silicon Buckyballs = Quantum Bits?
nachoworld writes: "Scientific American has reported that buckyballs have been made from silicon instead of carbon. Because the Si-Si bond is weaker and longer than a C-C bond, silicon was thought to be unable to form a buckyball-like structure. But Hidefumi Hiura and colleagues at the Joint Center for Atomic Research in Japan have been able to create a buckyball with a stabilizing tungsten core. Granted this core changes the properties of the Si buckyball, but Hiura suggests that they may serve as excellent quibits, which store single bits of information in quantum computers. The spin state of the metal atom could encode the bit, and the silicon cage would protect it from corruption."
is a method of reliably -reading- these bits. Believe it or not, spin isn't the easiest measurement to make on a tungsten atom inside a silicon-60 cage.
And suddenly the plastic surgeons had a much more powerful tool than previously available... one large buckyball in each breast, and voila! Buckyboobs!
(I know, it's silicon, not silicone, and it's definitely not saline, but I couldn't resist...)
what IS a buckyball?
if you mod me down, Darth, i shall become more powerfull than you can possibly imagine.. f33r |\/|1 |\|3g4+v C4r|\/|4
With all the discussion of potential quantum "bits", I never see a discussion of how exactly they could be made addressable. It's not like they can all be made to stay in the same place, unless you isolate them in some sort of larger structure, which would defeat the purpose of using them in the first place.
bp
It seems a little like supersonductors... you just have to keep trying new materials.
There is a good article about BuckyBalls from First Science here as well.
However, this is purely based on assumptions. I could be completely wrong. I still do math using my 10 fingers.
tcd004 The heart of the Pentium 4!
The Microsoft Split, revisited!
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Ok, I've heard that one and/or/not gate is like 4-5 molecules in today's chips... How much smaller would a buckyball bit be than a regular J-K, T, D, whatever flip-flop ?
The problem is that the article doesn't really give a huge amount of detail on the metal centre used, although if they are crowding 12 silicon atoms around it, I'd expect it to be fairly large. Nor is it explcitly stated that there are silicon-silicon bonds, although this is definitely implied by the diagram adjacent.
Without reading the actual paper itself, the existance of silicon buckballs is definitely unproven for me.
Elgon
I think if quantum computing is going to work, it's going to be first done with electrons. They're just easier to deal with. We have more practice with them, anyway. (Maybe photons.)
...or maybe not.
It seems a little like supersonductors... you just have to keep trying new materials.
There is a good article about BuckyBalls from First Science here as well
You can check them out at the Joint Center for Atomic Research site. According to their organizational chart, they are working on some interesting things indeed!!
_
props to all dead homiez
Time for a little rant.
The article says that these SiBuckyballs (suckyballs?) 'may' be able to serve as qbits. Interesting, yes. Fathomable to a dumb monkey like me? No. I mean, hell, I'm all about quantum computing. More better faster cheaper and all that, but the reason I read Popular Science and Discover magazine instead of Scientific American is that the articles in the former mags are *so* very much more comprehensible to me. I mean, I'm not a moron (really!) but I am also not a physicist, chemist, lawyer, doctor, lesbian or a Bhuddist. I have various knowledge in all of these fields, but no formal training. PopSci and Discover give so much more background and explination of basic concepts than does SciAm. I just wish that Popular Science would have more technical articles, but still explained in little words for dumbasses like me.
Okay, I'm done ranting now. Panties are no longer in a metaphorical bunch.
So how about them Knicks, eh?
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
How many Quibits to a Q*Bert?
I know this Engineer guy, and he knows a lot, and he told me about these buckyball things. He said they are soccer balls. But if they start making soccer balls out of different materials, what will this do to the World Cup?
First of all, you mean footballs, right? Here's a clue, if you're at a technical conference on the internet, and 90% of the attendees are calling it the internet, while 10% of the attendees are calling it The Microsoft Network with Internet Extensions, don't you think the 10% should change their naming scheme to conform to the common naming scheme?
As for changes in the World Cup? Probably few, the winners would be Brasil, Germany or maybe Italy, definitely not USia.
Ta-ta
But as this advances further than the Silicon counterpart, it paves the way for some huge research, specifically in Quantum Evolution.
I do quite a bit of study in Quantum Cryptography (I ain't no prof. though!) , and wonder how this all fits in.
The remarkable thing about nuclear quantum spin is that it is very weakly coupled with the enviroment. Relaxation times (how long the spin takes to dissapear) is on the order of 100's of milliseconds in many materials.
In this material it may turn out that nuclear relaxation times are of the order of hours ?? (in noble gases you can get relaxtion times of many minutes) due to the shielding of the nucleus from the enviroment by the silicon cage.
The nice thing about single-quanta systems (i.e. a single atom) is that it is in a definite state. A spin-half system is has only two states (read 1 or 0 ). (Im not sure what spin the Tungsten nucleus has). As long as you "refresh" the spin before it relaxes with the enviroment (decays) you can use it like ordinary memory, but obviously at much higher densities...
This Silicon cage is not really like fullerine which I think had 60 carbon atoms in a geodesic dome arrangement ? anyone know
No, a knee to the groin would just give them higher bandwidth...
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Nobody tell Steeve Jobs, I can see it now "Buckyballs first on Apple!" they'll enclose said silicon in colored plastic.
The difficult part is that superpositions, which are the key requirement of qubits, are inherently destroyed when measurements are made. But some experiments, like the above, manage to sustain the superposition for a significant time, because the system is only weakly coupled to the measuring instruments.
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Next thing you know, they'll be making Buckyballs out of hummus!
The original PRL article is Hiura et. al. Volume 86, No. 9 pp. 1733-1736. Some may have access to PRL online at: http://prl.aps.org/ This is a little more technical, but still worth a look.
see title. a true buckyball is a geodesic structure. this is simply a body-centered structure, just like the body-centered structures found commonly in other intermetallic systems. the only innovation here is the use of the buzz word "buckyball". this seems to be the only item that qualifies this as news worthy.
it never ceases to amaze me how journalists make hype by using words like "nano" and "buckyball". we all need to make a living, but be honest, wouldn't you all be better employed in the world of p.r?
Please.
Best Slashdot Co
tcd004
CHORUS: I've got buckyballs I've got buckyballs And they're such buckyballs Dirty buckyballs And he's got buckyballs And she's got buckyballs But we've got the buckiest...balls of them all
And my balls are always bouncing My ballroom always full And everybody cums and cums again If your name is on the guest list No one can take you higher Everybody says I've got Great balls of fire
CHORUS
Some balls are held for charity And some for fancy dress But when they're held for pleasure They're the balls that I like best My balls are always bouncing To the left and to the right It's my belief that my buckyballs Should be held every night
CHORUS
And I'm just itching to tell you about them Oh we had such wonderful fun Seafood cocktail, crabs, crayfish...
Ball sucker.
someone has an axe to grind ... ;-)
While neat science which probably has applications elsewhere, I really don't see this being at all beneficial to quantum computing. While the article doesn't state whether it is nuclear spin or electron spin that Hiura suggests using as the quantum bit (qubit), neither one would work well. Nuclear spin is an unpopular choice because it does not scale well to large-scale quantum computers. It is too difficult to engineer the exchange interactions between qubits to perform any reasonably sized calculations. As for electronic spin, being enclosed in this silicon cage would create a nightmare of interference. Not interference from outside particles, but interference between all the possible energy levels present due to the molecular bonds. As you get extra energy levels in a qubit, you find that the superposition from overlaying a large number of nearby energy levels creates an extremely irregular Hamiltonian that's not at all as nice as that for a single isolated electron spin. It is possible to emulate a single isolated electron spin in a complex system if you can distance (on the energy scale) the nearby energy levels sufficiently, but this is not always easy to do.
So there would be a lot of work and a lot of calculations to be done before anyone could even reasonably talk about using such a cage for a qubit.
these SiBuckyballs (suckyballs?)
That doesn't sound very flattering. I'd prefer "slickyballs."
(Yeah, sounds rather rude, but then "suckyballs" could be construed as rude, too.)
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Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Hmm, still sounds a bit rude, though.
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Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Now, with an arc welder and a two sticks of graphite, you too can create buckyballs!
Isolating them is an entirely other beast, though.
In quantium computing radio waves are used to affect and read the qubits. Something like a MRI machine. The "value" of the qubit is determined by the inference pattern created by the qubits when they are zapped with radio waves.
just scrape some soot out of a chimney or the container of a poorly burning candle. soot is formed when there is no oxygen present (otherwise it would have completely burned) and the carbon atoms bond with each other. This is almost identical to the use of high current and two sticks of carbon in an inert gas, just the source of the free carbon differs.
That brought up the concern to me, then, of how quibits are supposed to be read. If I have 0x0BADBABE stored in a quantum memory register, and I use any means of reading that register, then either the location or the state is going to change of the quibits. Since one can't very well have registers flying all over the place not knowing where they are, (and if they are caged by buckyballs as mentioned in the article, then they won't be going anywhere) that would mean the state changes, making it useless. In fact, this sort of puts the kibosh on quantum computing completely.
So why are top researchers putting so much time and energy into this field? What am I missing?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
And what other messes did I get into?
You can't handle the truth.
But the appearance of this article on Buckyballs only proves that I am not just a mere rambling, inane whore, but that I am also a powerful psychic! You should all fear my powers of advanced perception.
I pledge that I shall not use my powers for anything other than trying to craft the finest trolls, in order to whore all the karma I can. I have heard that it is easier to get laid if one has accumulated a high amount of Karma.
Please, when reading all of my comments, remember that I am a genius, and that I knew all before you ever could have due to my supernatural psychic abilities.
I had sex with a camel!
FYI
It was Ernest Rutherford who said "the only real science is physics, the rest are stamp collecting".
Very nicely, it seems.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
And I always thought buckyballs were the University of Wisconsin's Mascot's genitals...weird..
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