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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
for at least 5 years.
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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.
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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 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