Slashdot Mirror
IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Electron
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like we have another step forward in Quantum Computing - IBM has discovered how to detect and change the spin of a single electron. Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
"
IBM Detects and Changes Spin of Single Election.
Damn you Taco, and your politics section, it's corrupted my mind!
If spin can be measured in a meaningful way, the entire future of politics is suddenly up for grabs. Imagine a "spin detector" built into the home television!
Wow. "You spin me right round, baby right round, like a record baby, right round, round round...."
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Electron 1: Oh my god! they've found us! what can we do? we are doomed!
Electron 2: Oh stop being so negative
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
But they will have to dramatically increase the seek time of cats before this tech will be usable as a hard drive replacement.
You changed the outcome by measuring it!
It's good to see some tech companies actually innovate...
My website
Whew, okay. After I RTFA I realized they hadn't done the impossible, just the really hard. IBM can measured the energy required to change the spin of a single atom not a single electron. (A prerequisite of this, of course, is detecting the spin of a single atom; but that's not that difficult with electron microscopes.)
IBM has discovered how to detect and change the spin of a single electron.
Measuring the spin of electrons bound to atoms was first achieved in the famous 1922 Stern-Gerlach experiment, a key stage in the discovery and understanding of quantum spin.
However, to quote from this discussion of the experiment, the Stern-Gerlach technique cannot be used to measure free electron spin because 'The spreading of the electron wave packet washes out the separation effect due to the electron spin'. Therefore, it appears that IBM's discovery is significant.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems.
Of course by then we'll all be using quantum encryption techniques.
Overspinning electrons to overclock systems?
Nope. SCO still owns that title and will for a VERY long time. It's just that now IBM can measure the spin and quantify it with a number.
I'm quite sure the cat knows as well.
A while back there was a proposal to have a public onetime pad system that worked like this. there is a server, perhaps a sattelite, that is streaming random numbers at say gigabytes per second. To encode a message you weakly encrypt a prior message to the recipient telling him a precise start time: say the message reads: start colleting your onetime pad at the first occurence of the first 5 digits of the number pi that come after 12 noon. you both then collect the data that comes at that time and treat ti as a shared one time pad.
you opponents may be able to decrypt the pre-message eventually but not it time to make the start time. thus they cant collect the onetime pad data. the data rate of the random stream is chosen so that no plausible storage system could retain more than say a few hours worth of the data, so no one could just record it all. As long as no one can crack your message on that time scale you can dsafely send the one time pad whihc no one can crack by technical means.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is the sort of situation where the Internet is more a hinderence than a help. Over time discussions such as this will polarize the lay community either for or against a particular area of research, wher two areas of research strive to achieve similar goals.
Public Opinion greatly influences funding of research, so I hope that premature dabates of which technology is superior, won't shape decisions to fund one or the other, since ther is the possibility that one or the other area of research might hit a brick wall at some time in the future, at which point it wll be nessecery to pursue the other area of study. It would be bennefitial to all to have continued both areas of research in parrelel. Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that discussions like this alone will influence the course of research, but merely that the colaborative enviroment the Internet offers will promote (suprisingly) colaboration to the point where only one research path will be pursued by both teams, working together, rather than competing, as it were.This is an area whewre competition is a positive thing in academic research. I merely question the degree to which the Internet actually contributes to this.
Okay, one answer is that CmdrTaco got it wrong. He said, "IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Electron". He should have said, "IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Atom". Huge difference.
--
Bush's education improvements were partly fraud
Yes, but it's more general.
In QM, you measure a property of an object by applying an "operator" (you put in a function, and it spits out another function) to its wavefunction. Heisenberg said[*] that certain pairs of operators don't commute (meaning order is important - AB != BA), and so some pairs of properties can't be measured together.
"Position and momentum" is a particular example of a pair, as is "different components of angular momentum" (L_x and L_z, say). I can't remember how 'spin' fits into things, though ...
[*]Pedantry: Yes, I know Heisenberg talked about matrices, Schrodinger about operators.
Heisenberg is driving his car, when he gets pulled over by a cop. The cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"
To which Heisenberg replies "No, but I know where I am!"