'Laser Tweezers' Used to Sort Atoms

luckyguesser writes to tell us that Physicists at the University of Bonn are claiming to have knocked down one more quantum computing hurdle. Utilizing what they term "laser tweezers" they were able to sort and align seven atoms while capturing it on film. The plan is to construct a quantum gate using atoms imprinted with data.

Comments

A little more detail

[grapeape]

There is a bit more detail here, including a picture:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Atom-Sorting-Ma chine-29616.shtml

University of Chicago has been doing this...

[VoidEngineer]

for at least 5 years.

Granted, it seems like their tweezers might be slightly more precise than Chicago's, but as far as I can tell, the article is little more than University of Bonn's press-release saying that they're playing in the same league. Granted, Chicago now has 5 years of experience patenting the process and developing applications with it.

http://mrsec.uchicago.edu/Nuggets/Holographic_Opti cal_Tweezers/

It should be noted Chicago's method is a little more "rubic's cubish" than Bonn's "conveyor belt" setup. Coupled with what is probably a different setup for the optical trap and laser mesh, and the 5 year difference in publications, I would doubt that there would be any patent conflict and that this will wind up being a competing product.

Also, my guess is that these laser tweezers are going to play a part in the design of the first functional general nanoassemblers (of the style of Enterprise's 'replicators', not of the style of a grey goo assembler).

Re:film?

[Yogurtron]

I as well was wondering this. They reference this "film" repeatedly, and no film is shown on there, nor a link to it. FINALLY somebody that notices these things too. I'm usually the only one to see such greivous errors as mentioning a film yet not having one.

Lucky for you, I'm bored at work and have access to google's translation tools. It found a part of the university that did this, and it linked to a place that DOES have films:

Film: http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstract.cfm?URI=OPEX -11-25-3498

Just for reference, it was linked form here:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/Aktuelles/Presseinformation en/2003/455.html

Another way. mark Raizen

[XchristX]

The research group of Mark Raizen of the University of Texas at Austin has been working on similar techniques of 'tweezing' and 'laser culling'. Theoretically, in quantum tweezing, Gaussian lasers would sweep over a Bose-Einstein Condensate of ultracold atoms. The velocity of the sweep can be tuned in such a way that Landau-Zener tunnelling criterion is only satisfied for one atom in the reservoir and it tunnels into the sweeping beam.

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i7/e070401

  In addition, 'laser culling' is a process by which a doppler-cooled set of atoms, kept in a MOT trap, can have the nuber of atoms whittled down by lowering the trap height. This can be done until a sub-poissionian regime is achieved and a definite number state is in the trap.

http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2006/01/physics04.h tml

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.htm l