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'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.
Something to get at even the most stubborn nasal hairs.
There is a bit more detail here, including a picture:
a chine-29616.shtml
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Atom-Sorting-M
Young Einstin.
...BOOM...
Now Where is that chissel?
Then Yahoo Serious (as Einstine) Runs out with Beer with bubbles in his beer, chared from the Nuclear explosion.
Which makes me wonder Could mass production of Nano Tools could lead to acedental Nuclear Explosions?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That may very well be the world's smallest achievement.
Philosophy.
Being able to sort and manipulate things down to the atomic level?
This is going to make already messy divorce proceedings... even messier.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Nonsense. First of all, nobody's really figured out much of a way to apply quantum computers to symmetric encryption, only to most public key cryptography. There are some ideas around that the fast database lookup you can do with a quantum computer should translate to some way to break symmetric encryption faster, but most current algorithms support long enough keys to combat that already. From the viewpoint of exhausting the key space (i.e. a brute force attack) using a conventional computer, there's basically no point in a key size large than 128 bits (or even a bit less than that). Most current algorithms, however, support at least 256 bits.
Keep in mind that the difficulty of key exhaustion is exponential with respect to key size. IOW, adding one bit to the key size doubles the difficulty of key exhaustion. Adding 128 bits multiplies the difficulty by 2^128.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Now if they could only make a version of them with pieces of zircon encrusted in them, I know a few people who might be interested in these tweezers.
Before anyone gets all righteous on me and mods me to death, I'm borderline OCD.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
for G.W's brain cells
if you read it closely, it is not exactly the normal tweezer you and me use(not really.) its kinda like throwing an atom somewhere, instead of actually lifting it and moving somewhere. you cant guarantee that it will land at the same target all the time.
I thought I remembered reading that these quantum level gates would need to be redundant to get stable state information - something on the order of 1k quantum gates per transister based gate. If this is true, how long would it take to produce a computer? Years? Not a knock against the results - just a question.
I mean, really--is Previous position: "Maxwell's Daemon" going to impress the HR department?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I thought it said "Laser Tweezers KILL YOUR FAMILY, KILL YOUR FAMILY." I couldn't figure out whAT HTEH ELL IS GOING ON. BRLUARSHHRAS>
for at least 5 years.
i cal_Tweezers/
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_Opt
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).
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.
X -11-25-3498
n en/2003/455.html
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=OPE
Just for reference, it was linked form here:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/Aktuelles/Presseinformatio
Well, that aughta keep the obcessive comnpulsives busy for a while.
"Did anyone see my isotope of Boron?"
The researchers also announced that the first full program for their quantum computers would be entitled "Duke Nukem Forever".
"The game will be amazing", stated the researchers, "with state of the art graphics and the ability to play in multiple universes simultaneously."
The first beta release was expected some 25 years from now.
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.
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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.
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.ht
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
The SciFi channel is the History channel. It just got beamed back in time a few hundred years.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think you might be getting a little confused. For Quantum Computing you need the atoms/qbits to be entangled with each other and then seperated and for them to remain that way. You can't achieve this in a crystal (well you might achieve entanglement, but it'll be hard to remove the entangled atom and make it interact with a completely different atom without destroying the existing entanglement).
Its not about getting them "aligned perfectly", rather its about controlling the atoms without introducing noise to the system. This is why the laser approach has a significant advantage. Although I agree that a clock speed of 0.5Hz isn't particularly impressive! but they do say its not about clock speed but number of operations per second (do I hear someone from AMD shouting "hell yeah!"). And with QC's the number of equivalent FLOPS you can do for something like quick searching rises exponentially with the number of atoms you have!
Yes, it is interesting (I don't think I am a Luddite) but attempts to make leading edge practical physics understandable by governments and the great unwashed seem doomed to founder in misunderstanding. This is not a conveyor belt, this is not a tweezer, and nobody is writing anything on atoms. It's about as helpful as saying that I've succeeded in using a matter transfer process to increase the potential energy of a car (I've driven up a hill.)
This may be a slightly excessive rant, but I do think that any attempt to popularise or spread understanding of science by proceeding from reality to an extremely high level analogical overview while completely missing all the science in the middle - is doomed to failure and symptomatic of a society with growing scientific illiteracy.
Pining for the fjords