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Physicists Watch Individual Electrons Flow
SG writes "Physicists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed the world's most sensitive ammeter yet. The device allows current to be measured at the attoampere level and is expected to be of use in nanoelectronics, calibration devices, quantum computation and biology."
If you read this is simply a device that channels electrons into a single file channel then measures the movement through the channel. Akin to putting a dam in water then putting a very small pipe in the dam and putting a meter on that. What you are ultimatly changing is the amount of electrons that get through, so I'm guessing to measure a current of any size you would have to have millions or more of these???
We already know the answer to that. "Wave propagation" and "particle interaction" are redundant expressions; "wave interaction" and "particle propagation" are oxymoronic. "Waves" and "particles" are not entities or properties but rather behaviors - wave propagation is the constant or increasing lack of information about the quantum relative to the observer/instrument/indicator and particle interaction is the creation or transmission of information relative to the observer/instrument/indicator.
Single particle interactions are never in two places at once. The information that originally was one quantum may be distributed across space as it propagates as a wave or distributed across ensembles of different quanta in entangled states, but the interactions (particles) themselves are always strictly local.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The big one, I think, will be allowing the SI definition of current to be changed from the present unwieldly method of "an ampere is the steady current that when flowing in straight parallel wires of infinite length and negligible cross section, separated by a distance of one meter in free space, produces a force between the wires of 2 × 10-7 newtons per meter of length", then defining the Coulomb as "the charge delivered by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second".
The new, accurate electron counting capability alows the quantum of electrical charge to become the base unit, as it should be, and then to define current as the number of charges per second.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry