Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Silicon Buckyballs = Quantum Bits?

Posted by timothy on from the unceasing-wonders dept.

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."

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Beverly Hills rejoices! by drin · · Score: 5

    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...)

  2. Re:stupid q: but WHat IS? by Chakat · · Score: 4

    A buckyball is the short name for the molecule given the name Buckminsterfullerine. This molecule usually consists of pure carbon and is spherical shaped. The molecules got their name from their resemblance to the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller (think soccer balls). Some of the interesting properties are that these molecules are superstable, and one of the things they're thought they'd be useful in is nuclear waste storage.

    --

    If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.

  3. More promising qubits by TeknoHog · · Score: 4
    Superconducting loops with Josephson junctions seem much more promising candidates for quantum bits, where the 0 and 1 states are represented by opposite currents. Quantum superpositions of these currents - can you imagine current flowing both clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously! - have been observed in numerous experiments, some (technical) links are here and here.

    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.

    --

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  4. FYI: Physics Review Letters Reference by nickdog · · Score: 5

    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.