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Scientists Find Flaw in Quantum Dot Construction
ThePolkapunk writes "Scientists have been having problems in predicting the behavior of Quantum Dots, which are considered to be the most likely material to be used to build nanocomputers. Physorg is reporting that physicists at Ohio University believe they've found the problem, and it's with a flaw in the construction of quantum dots. If their theory pans out, "It's one more step towards the holy grail of finding a better quantum bit, which hopefully will lead to a quantum computer."" We first mentioned this about six years ago.
You reported this six years ag... oh, they pointed it out...
It's STILL a dupe, dangit!
There is no "University of Ohio"... It's "Ohio University"...
After painstaking years of testing and research, Scientists have found the source of the problem with malfunctioning Firestone tires: THEY WEREN'T BUILT PROPERLY.
:)
Film at eleven.
ZERO
to ask this...
The guy who wrote "the wellstone" is convinced that quantum dots can also be used to create programmable matter, something he came up with in one of his science fiction books.
I am just curious. Is this (programmable matter via quantum wells/dots) something that actual work is being done on anywhere, or that actual signs of progress can be seen in, or that Mr. McCarthy has the actual capacity to encourage actual science work to be done on? Or is this just a lone science fiction author running around trying to convince people to take him seriously?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I built my caravan from nanoscale quantum dots.
It got rusty really quickly, and the seals on the doors leak.
I would recommend other people avoid using them for building things.
This reminds me of a quote:
"Revolutions in technology are limited only by the vision of creativity and imagination"
- Bill Gates on Quantum Computing
Disclaimer : I know next to nothing about quantum computing.
However, I wonder if we really need quantum bits. Sure, we probably can reproduce the same kind of circuitry that we have now with quantum gates and whatnot, but I fear that would be missing the point, or rather grossly wasting, the capabilities opened by quantum mechanics, by forcing these into our current paradigm. That is, using quantum stuff as a new mechanics for our current paradigm, instead of coming up with a new paradigm that actually utilizes quantum properties fully.
In a word, this looks like evolution - will this cause a revolution?
As I said, I know almost nothing about this, so excuse me if my post didn't make sense at all.
My website
"Scientists have been having problems in predicting the behavior of Quantum Dots"
Couldn't they use the random number generator that sees into the future to predict the behavior of quantum dots? It was posted in Slashdot's Science section without the Funny Foot icon so it must be valid, just like the tsunami creatures. (Seriously, how can we not be sceptical about anything posted on Slashdot these days? When I read this headline the first thing I did was checking out on Google and Randi.org if quantum dots aren't just another new quack pseudoscience, and before I managed to verify their validity I had no time to read the article in question. Isn't there something wrong with a news source when the first thing I do is a research before I can trust anything I read? Isn't that a job of editors to verify their sources before posting stories? I just don't get it.)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
...if this will have an effect on the quantum slash dot effect?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
you read slashdot?
Bad, bad geek! There's no such thing as "too much computer power"
It's Ohio University... Athens, Ohio not to be confused with Ohio State University an hour and a half northwest in Columbus.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
"New & used Quantum Dots. aff Check out the huge selection now" ...ebay ad running next to TFA
or a '40 Gig video card', for that matter.
While there are many universities in Ohio, there is no U of O. In this case they mean Ohio Univ (not to be confused with OSU)
We have The Ohio State University and Ohio University, but no University of Ohio... at least not in Ohio. [NOTE: There are a number of other state-funded Universities: Bowling Green, Toledo, Akron, Kent, Miami, Case Western Reserve, et. al., but none of them have 'Ohio' in their name, except maybe Miami, which is often called "Miami of Ohio" to distinguish it from Miami University in Florida.]
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Computers will be "fast enough" when they can instant-on and operate at the speed of thought.
I'm talking no waiting for documents to load, or save. No swapping. No WAITING.
When the hardware/software reaches a point where it's a layer of skin over the fingers, it'll be Good Enough. We've progressed from thick woolen mittens to thick woolen gloves, but when it comes to operating transparency, we're not even to isotoner... let alone latex.
This only applies to self-assembled quantum dots. The ones created by lithography or otherwise manually constructed didn't have this problem in the first place. Don't get too excited (unless you're working with photoexcitation in self-assembled QDs, in which case this might matter to you).
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
at what point is it powerful enough? when it can factor primes out of a 500 digit long number in less than 10 seconds; thus making public/private key encryption useless. How about using it to model very complex topics such as enviroment trends, or how space shuttles will preform under certain gravity or other such conditions? Why did we make these super-powerful calculators when we could have just stopped when we made the slide-rule?
They could be finding cures to cancer, or making better space shuttles, or doing a ton of things with applications that would be useful
Uh.. wow.
The people designing better computers aren't curing cancer because they aren't biologists. It isn't like intelligence is just something you can put in a pipe and direct it whereever you want. Some people are just better at certain things than others. Meanwhile the kinds of people who gravitate toward research fields tend to only be effective when they're doing things they find interesting and exciting. What they personally most enjoy or can best apply their talents toward may or may not be the most important thing in the world, but if it's productive and makes some sort of difference, who are we to question?
And why target the people improving computing power, and not any other "nonuseful" field? In particular, why on earth target people like the ones from this article, who are improving computing power by expanding our understanding of and ability to harness basic physics, and working in an area where discoveries potentially have direct applicability to all kinds of other nanoscale technologies, like, I don't know, smart medicines.
Even if your "couldn't they be doing something more useful" thing made sense, your examples are very poor. Better space shuttles aren't being built for a lack of ingenuity, they're being built for a lack of funding. And curing cancer in particular is a horrible example because much of the interesting expanding work in the medical research field at the moment is in bioinformatics. Meaning that cancer research would directly and seriously benefit from a major jump in the capacity of computing power, such as the one these nanocomputer people could make possible.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Is the technology in this article for use in quantum computers?
Or nanocomputers, i.e. normal computers that just happen to be created through nanotechnology methods?
Please explain, thanks.
The article at Physorg has the title:
Scientists find flaw in quantum dot construction
Just below this I see a google ad:
Discount Quantum Dots
New & used Quantum Dots. aff Check out the huge selection now!
www.eBay.com
Heh!
> They could be finding cures to cancer, or making
> better space shuttles, or doing a ton of things
> with applications that would be useful. How is
> getting a 800 ghz computer with 500 gigs or ram
> and a 40 gig video card going to change things?
Have you ever thought that making a more powerful computer might be a key component to finding the cure to cancer?
Powerful computing enables scientists to do things like model proteins and DNA strands, and their interactions, in more and more detail.
Improved simulation capabilities will help all branches of science.
Does that mean that i should wait to upgrade my computer ?
What Sig
They didn't prove that there was something fundamentally wrong with Quantum Dots all they found was that there were problems getting thier experiment to work... which they already have a work around for. "But a fine residue left behind on the surface that Ulloa calls the "wetting layer" can cause problems during experiments."
How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories? We don't. You do. :) If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it's important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
wud
This comming from someone who has the Dukes of Hazzard drinking game listed in their journal?
Not that is funny!
40% of the US economy is dependent on applications of quantum mechanics, and all of the rest of it indirectly feels the effects.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
They were not trying to say a flaw was found in quantum dots themselves, I don't think. What they meant was that a flaw was found in the previously used method of quantum dot construction.
Here is the official press release on the Ohio University website.
Is there some relationship between /. and PhysOrg? If so, Commander Taco should be ashamed of it... PhysOrg is an eyeball tarpit, it NEVER credits the original article or provides a link back to it. Never. Not once. It might as well be dead trees...
Here's the original article at Ohio University without the PhysOrg spam.
Is there some reason why self-assembled quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than ones created by photolithography?
Conversely is there some reason why lithographically constructed quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than "self-assembled" ones?
What is the importance of the distinction?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Heisenberg was driving down the road, and a policeman pulled him over. He asked, "do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replied, "no, but I can tell you where I am."
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
slashdot used to be dry...
Get your torrents...
Hmm, having problems with spray painting with energy on quantum dots at an atomic level because the current stabilization coating won't allow light through the "paint"? Seems like they need to look at a clear coat paint (read: possibly different energy frequencies that will not cause the overcoating effect).
Alternately, how about doing something like sputtered thin film (a hard drive surface coating technology) on a quantum level, which might reduce the thickness of the stabilization coat and allow a enough light to trigger the switch (Can't fix the "paint"? Fix the "sprayer").
And, of course, the obvious obligatory comment for this article - A computer the size of a grain of sand? Dots nice, but how do I connect the keyboard...
While miracle breaktrougs are useful, we don't have to wait for them to do something useful. We can already build faster/cheaper/lower power computers than we do today.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"After painstaking years of testing and research, Scientists have found the source of the problem with malfunctioning Firestone tires: THEY WEREN'T BUILT PROPERLY."
See what happens when you outsource?
"... or making better space shuttles, or doing a ton of things with applications that would be useful."
Dude, making a faster computer is infinitely more valuable then a new space shuttle. Having a faster computer will eventually allow more powerful space exploration, however, the only current point space shuttles is the hope there will be useful applications... such as faster computers.
That's the problem. In this era of budget reduction, our scientists are now forced to buy their Quantum Dots off of Ebay.
Unfortunately, not only have many of these dots been defective, following the installation and usage instructions included with the Dot have left many of our top scientists sterile.
It is possible that this is a plot by Al Queida to weaken the population of intellectuals in the US.
"We first mentioned this about six years ago"
Oh, so you admit that it's a dup?
How is getting a 800 ghz computer with 500 gigs or ram and a 40 gig video card going to change things?
Such a computer would allow doctors and surgeons to take complete body scans of people at sub-millimetre resolutions and visualize them in real-time. Quite useful if you are trying to tell if someone has cancer, and if so, how far it has spread. Such a computer would also allow you to model complex protein-folding in real-time, thus helping identify which genes and chemicals could kill off the viruses/diseased cells. Plus it could also do the CAD and engineering required to design such a new spacecraft.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
but when do I get my open source-equivalent of
"The Sim's?"
By the time you have 800 ghz, 500 gigs of ram, etc, etc, it will take every bit of it to run whatever version of Windows will be by then.
....loooooooooots of stories (linked from the front page, not comments) link to physorg. Interesting for usre. i'm starting to distrust this place more and more. Not to mention Roland Whathisbucket getting posted all the time, never rejected.
"Computers will be "fast enough" when they can instant-on and operate at the speed of thought."
It's called a secretary. Anyway the limitations will always be economic, not technological.
We first mentioned this six years ago...
How absurd and inanely pretentious. It's astounding that the search engine the editors are using allows them to say "it's a dupe from six years ago" but not be able to recognize the dupe from yesterday. Sheesh.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Much of cancer research is carried out on incredibly fast machines, more of which would be welcome. Do you have any idea how DNA and cells are studied and analyzed? There's entire university departments dedicated to the area where biology and computing meet, it's called bioinformatics, and it will play a role in any cure found for cancer. How did you think research is done? A single microarray would take 1,000 scientists 1,000 years to analyze by hand.
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Now somebody's obviously banking on the idea that quantum physicists are most likely to fall for the six step scheme. Perhaps they'll get stuck on "Step 5: ???" and spend the rest of their natural lives trying to solve for ???.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
3 or 4 times a day from what I saw...
I am from Ohio, and I have never heard of an University of Ohio; maybe Ohio University.
Doesn't the article read just like your typical Star Trek plot?
You have a noble experiment:
Nanoscientists dream of developing a quantum computer, a device the size of a grain of sand that could be faster and more powerful than today's PCs.
So, after they have
blasted the quantum dots with light to create the quantum mechanical state
they encounter the problem:
they couldn't consistently control that state
So, the science officers get the work and after some time the find out the cause of the problem:
the wetting layer caused interference, instead of allowing the light to enter the dot and trigger the quantum state
And, after some hard thinking Wesley Crusher...
suggests that scientists could tweak the process by re-focusing the beam of light or changing the duration of the light pulses to negate the effects of the wetting layer!
And the day is saved.
Are those those little ice cream pellets they sell at Astroworld?
Six years ago? Is there some other Slashdot search interface available to the editors that doesn't suck like the one available to readers? With daily Google propaganda, you'd think they'd have some kind of useable search engine for all the vast stores of content that are "owned by the Poster", but lost in the haystack a few days after posting.
--
make install -not war
Quantum dots contain what's called a "D-R branch". This branch contains vast amounts of resources (level 1-5, as subatoms) that no-one seems to have exploited yet. Use these, and your problems are gone, baby! Using these in practice would create processors (not the kind of CPUs we are used to today, but rather C/A delayed inputs) that could handle as much as 10000 times the amount of calculations the currently fastest supercomputer. This however, requires enourmous amounts of energy, which is one of the reasons most scientists have not researched this field much yet.
Quantum Slashdot effect?
Is that the one where you don't know if the server is burning until you check it?
No; it's the one where a story gets posted on Slashdot, and in a cool EPR style, the server is melted down as a direct result within a shorter period of time than would normally be possible, given that requests to the web page shouldn't be able to travel faster than the speed of light.
Posting a story on Slashdot creates a special entanglement between the server and the computers of thousands of geeks. This means the poor server doesn't even get a split second to inhale its final breath before the messages arrive at something approaching lightspeed and melt it down.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I did want the "non-disclosure" of my mispublishing of my unprecedent discovery".
Nobody know about me, i'm more intelligent than Nevada's doctors.
open4free © QuantumRighted
First, I know the terms Q-dots is a trademark, and I think "Quantum Dots" might be trademarked by the same company. So don't give them so much mindshare, since that company isn't really even on the "forefront" of the technology. Call them fluorescent semiconductor nanocrystals, because it actually describes what they are, so people won't think they're being used in quantum computing (not yet, at least).
Second, these nanocrystals blink. Every researcher I've seen speak about these things mentions the blinking, but only recently did I hear someone give an explanation: poor surface coating allows electrons to leak out of the the crystal.
Third, Semiconductor nanocrystals are made of several layers. The central layer is usually Cadmium Selenide (CdSe), coated by Zinc Selenide. The second coating has a higher band gap energy, so electrons get "stuck" inside the nanocrystal and then emit photons when they drop back to the ground state. Unfortunately, these nanocrystals are very sticky without more coatings. Often a PEG (polyethylene glycol) linker is stuck on the outside of the ZnSe surface to inhibit these non-specific binding events.
Last, semiconductor nanocrystals are cool because you can excite them at many wavelengths, but the emitted photon's wavelength (color) depends on the size of the crystal being illuminated. The bigger the crystal, the redder the emission. That makes them size tunable, and easily multiplexible. Eventually, that could be really useful for quantum computing (or digital video, possibly).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Perhaps.
Quantum dot memories in transistor embodiment is still an option.
-_-_-_-_-_-_
Login: anonymous
Password: ********* (anonymous?, who was the person? 1 of 10^10?)
Step 2: IMPOSSIBLE
-_-_-_-_-_-_
Login: root
Password: **************** (Quantum Computing can't to solve it!)
open4free ©
Jumpin Jesus. I know what I'm doing for valentine's day.
Quantum computing will fail, I believe when we try to actually squeeze magic out of quantum theory we will find its limits. This will be better than quantum computing having worked, as it will finally show us a way beyond the current interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Without any reason? You can find many reasons here. Seriously... the random number generator predicting future... just accepting it as "science" without any reason puts you in the same category as a religous fanatic in my book.
he won't respond (you know who i mean), theres no use mentioning his character gratuitously
it should be laforge who comes up with this technical idea, or data, if this is "typical" star trek plot stuff... wesley wasnt even a focus in the "typical" episode
Until their VoIP call managers don't run on Windows, I wouldn't classify Cisco as a 'security company'. The .edu I work for has had it's call managers routinely infected this worms. I don't recall our traditional PABX ever having this problem.
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The wetting layer is a by-product of the method used to grow the dots.
I can talk about InAs dots in GaAs, which are the ones I know best. In order to grow the self-assembled dots, you first grow enough layers of GaAs so that you end up with an atomically flat layer of GaAs. Then, you start growing layers (one atomic layer at a time, such is the magic of molecular beam epitaxy!), until a certain "critical height" (I think it's around 5 monolayers). At that time, you stop the growth for a little while and the InAs layer spontaneously forms "droplets" in the GaAs surface, which will be the quantum dots after you grow some GaAs on top. The problem is that the droplets don't use up all the InAs that was deposited, so some remains in the surface and forms the so-called "wetting layer" which behaves similarly to a quantum well. I don't remember any references off the top of my head, but look for articles on the "Stranski-Krastanov growth mode".
What? No reference to Adventure? :D
"Somebody get this freakin' duck away from me!"
BytesTemplar.com
I think it's important to point out that what these people are doinmg is not the whole story about quantum dots. They use a particular technique, and they found a way to improve it, but other people are using completely different techniques that have different advantages and disadvantages. Using "Scientists Find Flaw in Quantum Dot Construction" as a title is very misleading; it's like if an amelioration to firefox was reported as "Scientists find flaw in networking that could fix the internet".
Didn't we put a man on the moon using primarily slide rules? :) Just sayin'
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yeah, those computer guys should be studying biology instead of making the computers used to help map the human genome, silly geeks.
OK, enough troll feeding.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
or, in a lot of the science articles we see coming from American universities, do the professors who author them sound like they hail from other countries? Giuseppe so-and-so, Gunther such-and-such, Sjogren something ...
With this article it just struck me.
There is an apparent gap between American High School students (bad and getting worse) and American University students (apparently still good). Any profs out there care to comment?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Wrong, viruses have been evolving for millions of years to use other life forms to survive and reproduce.
There is a law of biology that says something like: any parasite evolves to be less harmfull to its host(s).
No waiting would be handy. The closest I've seen to it is wake-from-sleep in OS X on powerbooks. MacOS would snort and chug and grind and be caught with its pants down Every Single Time you woke the machine... OS X is just BING! there. Which is great.
However, the fact that the OS eats 256 megs of ram on boot (exponentially more when you start doing ram-sucking things like opening Finder windows) and the powerbook I'm using as an example shipped with 128 and an OS that used 40 of it....
ugh.
> Didn't we put a man on the moon using primarily slide rules?
Nope. In fact, miniaturizing a computer by making it solid state was one of the problems that had to be solved for the Apollo missions. Sure, their computer was slow and specialized by our standards, but they could not have done a lot of the calculating work with slide rules with enough speed to be useful.
Virg