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Tiny Holes Advance Quantum Computing
Nick writes "Worldwide, scientists are racing to develop computers that exploit the quantum mechanical properties of atoms - quantum computers. One strategy for making them involves packaging individual atoms on a chip so that laser beams can read quantum data. Scientists at Ohio State University have taken a step toward the development of quantum computers by making tiny holes that contain nothing at all. The holes - dark spots in an egg carton-shaped surface of laser light - could one day cradle atoms for quantum computing."
Quantum computing is quite simply where we turn after existing silicon is exhausted. Once the basics about the random nature of quantum particles, which is extremely interesting, the meaning of computer and mechanics thereof can be redefined.
Well, yes, that rather is the definition of "hole," isn't it? Having nothing in them is what distinguishes them from the rest of the surroundings.
Scientists ... making tiny holes that contain nothing at all.
So these boffins have developed "nothing", but one day, in the far future, this nothing could be filled with something important.
Wow. What an age we live in.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
They're speed holes, they make the computer go faster....
The thing I'm really looking forward to on Slashdot 2015 are all the posts:
"Why would anyone need that much power? I remember 9 years ago when we only had 10 qubits to work with! Quantum programmers sure are spoiled and lazy today."
I'm a big tall mofo.
If you get a quantum 3D-accelerated graphicscard.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Actually, most of holes on Earth are full on air. Even void isn't quite empty. If you have a couple of atoms forming a particle, the space between them isn't quite empty either - they partially overlap, the uncertainity principle says they "partially are" there. The idea is about making small holes with REAL void - no particles, no photons, no "with a little probability, there" electrons, just total null. Not quite easy. I, for one, can't quite imagine how are they going to stop neutrinos from entering that space...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
And how many would it take to fill the Albert Hall?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Quantum computers will use red smoke (the Rubium cloud). Will we call the hobbiests that push the limits of these machines Quark shakers?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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. . . won't quantum computers mean an end to binary?
In the old days, a cat in a box was either alive or dead - one or zero, you might say. Nice and easy.
But when it gets quantum? How the hell is a simple machine going to cope when it asks "Is it one or zero?" and gets told "Both"
"We've had to replace 'if' and 'and' with 'maybe' and 'probably'. And 'not' has become obsolete."
So.. it has come to this
Probably or probably not. 50/50 either way.
The original news release, which has an animation to support the story is available at the Ohio State University Research News site.
Milalwi
So it will run Duke Nukem Forever then?
I, for one, can't quite imagine how are they going to stop neutrinos from entering that space...
Simple. They'll just repolarize the quantum invariance field and then bombard it with a tachyon pulse. This creates a standing wave of Heisenberg Flux, which is the only way to be certain the hole is empty.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
1. What is the working principle behind this (mechanism of trapping) ?
2. Are these experiments performed at room temperature ?
3. How do they ensure they have trapped one "desired" atom and not more atoms and not some other impurity?
4. How is the laser prevented from interfering with lattice (non-desirable interactions) ?
5. What is the decoherence time which governs if you can really do any computation before the result is lost ?
This is indeed an important step forward. But alas the student is graduating in august and I hope there is someone to followup on this work:
Theoretically, if they release the atoms above the chip in just the right way, the atoms will fall into the traps. They hope to be able to perform that final test before Christandl graduates in August.
Physicists could soon be creating black holes in the laboratory
When shall we get pet dark holes?
Imagine cleaning the house with one of these around!
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
> Scientists at Ohio State University have taken a step toward the development of quantum computers by making tiny holes that contain nothing at all
In related news, Ohio State University has recieved research funding from the NSA to perform Ear Exams on all members of Congress twice a year...
...and this is why Moore's Law will continue, even though Moore himself says that it won't. Never underestimate the cleverness of the Human.
One of the key to making things at nanoscale is to have fault and defect tolerance. With billions of elements in the system, you are bound to get manufacturing defects as well as many run-time defects. Even in modern DRAMs they have redundant columns of memory cells to improve the yield by swapping the defective ones with spare ones. FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Arrays) offer in-circuit reconfigurability. HP showed Teremac few years ago which had millions of defects yet it worked just "fine" by detecting the defects and reconfiguring around it.
In short there will be sources of errors and faults in these systems, but there are various ways to get around it. Also in quantum computing, you can encode your data in such a way that it is immune to noise (atleast to certain extent) and is called Quantum error correction.
But also remember that science is not just about destination but also the journey. Even if practical quantum computers are never built, we are likely to learn many interesting aspects which may be used elsewhere.
"How about our Scientists rescue the Hubble Telescope first, something we know works, then worry about the quantum chip later."
No, but first, our scientists have to clean their teeth, then our scientists will be asleep for the next eight hours. Once our scientists have got up in the morning, they'll have a bowl of cheerios and then read the paper for a bit. Then maybe they can tackle the Hubble telescope problem (although the fact that all n million of them are trying to write on the blackboard at the same time does mean they won't make much progress. And the biologists have to sit around twiddling their thumbs because there's not much they can do to help). After Hubble, there's some promising work on cancer they need to finish up, before they can get on with a bit of geology.
Hopefully, someday soon, our scientists will realise that they can get much more done if they allow small groups of themselves to concentrate on different things, so they can make progress in different fields at the same time. In the mean time, though, you're right. They're all wasting their time on this pointless quantum computing nonsense.
Diamonds are not a metal... and Diamonds have the highest thermal conductivity... the last thing you want here for semiconductor devices is a substrate with the highest electrical conductivity... you want a very good insulator, which also gets heat away very quickly... this is where Diamond layers come in... not solid machined diamonds, but diamond deposited or grown into a thin layer...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
In fact, it would be very surprising if it turns out to be NP-complete, as it is in NP intersect co-NP. Also, no efficient quantum algorithms are known for NP-complete problems, and it is generally suspected that quantum computers won't be able to solve them efficiently. For example, see this semi-technical paper.
;)
You had better get that right in your undergrad thesis
You can actually guarantee that it will be empty, by creating wave functions that overlap in such a fashion that the probability of a particle being in that space is, in fact, 0, or, by creating wavefunctions which when combined state that the probability of there not being something in that location is infinite. Picture two asymptotic curves joining at a vertical axis, mirrored.
There are a lot of extremely odd quantum effects which aren't physically possible, in any classical or comprehensible universe, however do happen. For instance, it's possible to create a negative temperature. Not negative, as in minus 22 farenheit, but negative, as in below absolute zero!
This happens when you rapidly invert the polarity of a magnetic field in which is contained a bose-einstein condensate - in the time that it takes for the condensate to re-align it's spin, it has a rapid change from a negative temperature to a positive temperature once more. The energy of a negative temperature is, actually, greater than that of an infinite positive temperature!
Anyway, enough quantum rambling. If you don't believe me, look here.
Acutally that won't happen because if it happend, it would imply information travelling faster than light, and that does not happen. Even if you have a pair of perfectly entangled qubits (called an e-bit), and you seperate them by a great distance and perform a quantum operation on the first qubit, the measurment outcome of the first qubit will not affect the measurement outcome of the second qubit.
The idea of Quantum Teleportation has been misunderstood. Quantum Teleportation is not like the Star Trek transporters. Quantum Teleportation is a method of sending a qubit to another person. In order to do this you need to share an e-bit. Ex. Alice has a qubit Y she wants to send to Bob. Alice and Bob also share an e-bit E (which is a perfectly entagled pair of qubits 1/sqrt(2)(|00>+|11>). Alice performs a controlled-not operation on her part of the e-bit Y, then she does a Haddamard transformation (Quatum Fourrier Tranform on 1 bit) on the qubit Y, then she measures both the qubit Y and her part of the e-bit E. At this point we have two classical bits 00, 01, 10, or 11. She then sends this to Bob. Bob the performs a controlled-not on his part of the e-bit Y based on the first bit, and a controlled phase-flip based on the second bit at which point Bob's qubit that he now has is Y. This process perfectly sends a qubit from Alice to Bob, but the key part of this method that needs to be remembered is that the two classical bits that Alice measured had to be sent to Bob. Without these bits Bob would not be able to get Y and sending the classical bits, takes the usual ammount of time.
What's even cooler is that if Alice's qubit Y had been entangled with another qubit X, the entanglement is preserved after the QT process so that the qubit Bob has is now entangled with X.
Disclaimer: I am not a quantum physicist. I am a recent computer science grad who just took a course on Quantum Computing. Just one.
The problem with the current quantum computer research is there are always butterflies in China flapping their wings ... interfering with the research done in the US.
Here are posted movies of the experiment
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/eggcarton.htm