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Crystals And Lasers Help to Create Nanostructures
Spanishfly writes: "Physicsweb.org is reporting that Dieter Meschede of the University of Bonn in Germany and colleagues have created a three-dimensional interference pattern (holographic crystal). A cesium atom laser is fired into the crystal and uses the pattern generated on the crystal to position the atoms from the laser to create nanostructures. This new technology could be the future of optical circuits and could become an integral part of the semiconductor industry."
There seems to be a fast pace to the announcements from the laser & crasytalography world atm. I'm pleased because It's the kind of buzz and hype we need to support the flaky tech industry.
;)
XP has failed to set the world on fire. I think the Linux buzz has been and gone (probably for the best, consolidation is what we need now).
The CPU people seem to have hit a plateau. We just don't seem to need any more raw speed. The GFX people have hit the same place too me thinks. HD storage density is now at a place where we have more storage in our computers than we can readily generate data to fill. We've got broadband. Okay you can never really have too much of these things but ram & hd doublers are very much a thing of the past and my network connection is rarely maxed out.
What does that leave?
What technologies are going to drive us to spend?
If I knew I wouldn't say, I'd be investing
Roll on crystalline storage and optical computers!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They already have a small machine (not exactly portable yet, but they're working on it) capable of obtaining several types of medical information at once - much like the medical tricorder from Star Trek, and the hypospray has already been invented and was successfully tested in England on children who were receiving their "BCG". It forces the liquid through the pours in the skin, causing a slight inflamation in the skin for about 10 minutes, but leaving no scar and the injection itself having no pain.
With all of this, I can't help but think where this new technology will lead. I do hope that in my lifetime I witness the storing the patterns of whole objects digitally on a microchip which releases requenced electrons into a container containing some of one of the liquid-crystal forms with 5 carbons which temporarily hardens on being struck with electrons. Entire objects could be cretaed from an accelerated particle stream, including smaller components for electronic devices, remarkably improving the speed of miniaturisation and the quality of miniaturised products, aswell as boosting productivity because it would be a much faster production method.
This will certainly be a very welcome technology when developed further.
X-ray Crystallography and Diffraction studies enables us biologists and other structural-materials scientists to resolve atomic structure in say, proteins. We can now use the interference data collection methods that we normally use for near monochromatic x-rays diffracting through our favorite protein crystals to do other nifty things.
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it! Shocking indeed to find that quantum bits, or qubits, can be both 1 and 0 at the same time! Or that it can be impossible to eavesdrop on a message sent as qubits! Scientists are exploiting such quantum weirdness to build quantum logic gates as a step towards a super-powerful quantum computer. In other work they are inventing ultra-secure crytography systems in which data is coded in the quantum states of individual photons.