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Physicists Store, Retrieve a "Squeezed Vacuum"
An anonymous reader sends us to the site of Science Magazine for news that will interest those who have followed experiments to slow and stop light. Research groups in Canada and Japan have succeeded separately in storing a special kind of vacuum — a "squeezed vacuum" — in a puff of gas and then retrieving it a split second later. Such experiments might lead to advances in quantum encryption. At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.
It's a matter of perception, which is very limited when you see the universe through a pinhole.
What?
but I thought it was my brakes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
like the guy just "reinvented" the radio. Take a carrier, modulate the carrier, remove the carrier signal, amplify the result, and output to a speaker.
What?
If you stop to think about how science has advanced in the last 20 years your brain, like mine, might explode. DNA, human genome, genetic medical treatments, dark matter, hawking radiation, quantum related developments... all leading up to 2012? There are people alive right now that when they were born, germs were unknown never mind planes, space travel, dark matter, and something as small as an atom. Mind you, there are few like that still alive, but there are. At no time in history has information advanced so much in so short a time. The Internet has helped play a part in that also.
Should quantum computing become reality, perhaps we will have 400000x current computing power on our desktops. At that point, voice recognition becomes reality, huge data stores become reality and usable. Things like this could push the information age into a whole new era.
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Too much junk in my hall closet.
Comment of the year
The Singularity is near.
I repeat, the Singularity is near.
I hope you are all ready.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Dude, they are completely different. On one hand you have people like Heisenberg and Schrödinger, on the other hand you have people like Bach and Beethoven.
I can't help but be amused at the thought of God, Newton, and Einstein sitting together "up there, somewhere" looking down on this little science experiment, chuckling at how we having it all wrong, and then thinking, just to fsck with us, they'll go along with our theory for a little while. *POIT!* (vacuum disappears and reappears), to which they have a long, hearty, teary-eyed laugh at our expense and dare us to make *that* make sense. ;-)
I don't see it happening in the near-future, but perhaps near the end of my life-time (I'm 20-something). And it won't be like the first computer revolution, with guys in their garages and basements screwing around with computer hardware. The first quantum computers will be only really useful for large Monte-Carlo projects (like the Earth Simulator) that require tons of computing power.
The problem then becomes building a quantum computer that is faster than the supercomputers of the time. The first quantum computer prototype won't just start out as a powerhouse. After we get the first quantum computer working, it may be up to a decade before we see one actually being used. 30-40 years later maybe we'll see quantum computers in the home, but we'll all be long dead by the time that happens.
As far as building a quantum computer goes, this is comparable to making a transistor. There's still a LONG way to go.
I keep mine in the hall closet. What's the big deal?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
To stop light, researchers first shine an intense and continuous beam of laser light into a gas of atoms."
Did I miss a class? Are there gases made up of things that are not atoms?Great line from the article:
Hmmm. Hey! Maybe they should ask Frank Sinatra? :)
....bags you store cloths and blankets in then hook your vacuum cleaner up to, sucking out all the air and squeezing the cloths and blankets down in size for storage.
Later unplugging the bag to restore the cloths and blankets to full size.
Well, how did they knew they stored nothing in there? And how did they prove they recovered the same nothing from the cloud as they have put into it? And did it take no space in the clouds "memory"?
/dev/null!
That of course can be used in Quantum Computing, it's gonna be
Your analogy is pretty baroque.
We live in an information universe, and the observable universe the product of a quantum computer that exists by default and was not created.
Some beings are simply programs being executed, and some, the self aware, are programmers.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
There are some possibilities to use quanta (?) as signal carriers, but no encryption is involved. The theory is that if you wiretap such a signal, then the original receiver will find out. So it could maybe be called "Quantum Wiretap Detection" or the like. But since this is a physical thing that relies on theoretical models that are typically not exact, it is not actually known whether this is really secure. I seem to remember that there are actually possibilities to liesten in, found in te last few months.
My personal conclusion is that alls this "Quantum " mainly serves as a way to get scientific funding and thet the probabilities of something really useful comming out of it are rather slim. Even "quantum computation" (name is right this time) may never be able to produce computational elements large enough to matter. Factoring 10 or even 100 is not impressice, considering that my very old pocket calculator could go up to 10^20.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...but I always was taught that a vacuum is what you have when you don't have anything. Given that, how the fsck do you store one, or for that matter retrieve it later?
"Now I pump the air back into the bell jar. Amazingly, the vacuum is gone! I have stored it in the ninth dimension of Zardoz, and can retrieve it when I pump the air back out again. Cower before my scientific prowess, fools!"
I thought the headline said "Pharmacists Store, Retrieve a 'Squeezed Vacuum'." Now that'd be a story.
It's beyond that door, where light and shadow meet in a place we call The Twilight Zone. The vacuum's in the corner, with a Talking Tina and broken stopwatch on top.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
With the Internet why is Quantum Encryption needed?
If you have an algorithm that can be run on 2 computers separated by distance, you can stream IP packets into several different strands that are relayed through several P2P servers just to confuse things and then reassembled at the destination machine. You could even add in false information that would be filtered out. In fact, a youtube video received by both computers could be used as the "carrier" the same way a one-time use cipher pad was used in the old days.
When messages can be sent in chunks at electron speeds via different routes, I do not see how it is even theoretically possible to decrypt them. You can't listen to every bit of traffic, there is simply too much of it.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
On that note, I pitch that all non-musical analogies be barred from slashdot.
Be relentless!
Give it a rest...
This is getting ritardando.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Paging Mr. Whipple.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
If you can make a matter-squeezer out of a broken remote control with no batteries, then you'll really have something. (John Varley's Red Thunder).
Computers obey me.
This implies that one can impose a signal on the heisenberg uncertancy of a quantum system. You can then measure the position and velocity of a given particle with greater precision than earlier theories claim is possible. This accuracy is gained at the expense of greater uncertainty at other points in time just prior to and after the point at which one measures the given property.
I see no conflict, just a clever "trick" that a well designed experiment could take advantage of. Sounds to me like a challenge to be the first to publish greater than heisenberg uncertancy resolution measurements of a hydrogen atom at various speeds beyond simple rest state. Perhaps we can even get quark sized resolution while looking at a proton. Now THAT would be cool
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
True.
So, it's not physically possible that for me to ever get a 30GHz Core 10 Quadro. It ain't gonna happen.
False. There is no rule that says a single processor has to be 0.5 cm in diameter. A processor 0.1 cm in diameter could clock at 150 GHz. Asynchronous logic boosts the effective clock rate even further.
Of course, these numbers are theoretical. In practice, whether they will be reached or exceeded will depend on many factors.
Enough, for Tissimo's sake!
At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.
Sorry but what boundary between quantum and classical realms, I'm pretty sure QM is right and Classical systems are just approximations.
"Quantum Key Distribution" (QKD for short) is the term you're looking for, and it does exactly what it says. There are already commercial QKD systems on the market and their primary application is in closely spaced bank networks. QKD isn't sci-fi. It's being used right now. And yes, key distribution *is* encryption. In it's simplest, most secure, and most inefficient form, encryption involves simply XOR'ing the message with a key of the same bit length. (i.e. A One time PAD) Very few encryption systems utilize a one-time PAD though, since it's obviously very wasteful. Still, you *could* use quantum key in that manner if you really wanted to.
One of the biggest strengths, and weaknesses, of QKD is that it is impossible to deterministically measure and replicate a photon. (Google the "no cloning theorem" if you're interested.) This means that an eavesdropper can't cut into a QKD line and listen in without changing it's content in a way that those using it can detect. The detection of an eavesdropper, however, is not random. It's a certainty that arises from the statistics. The downside to all this is that QKD currently only works when the two parties involved are close enough to send photons to each other directly. This limits current QKD systems to a practical distance of approximately 100 km. (This is primarily due to loss in fibre.)
There is, of course, a workaround: Quantum repeater stations. These are somewhat deceptively named because they don't actually repeat a quantum state. What they do is create a chain of entanglement that ultimately winds up with two widely separated parties (and noone else, including the repeaters) sharing entangled photon pairs that can be used to set up a key. Secure QKD can take place even if the repeaters aren't trusted. I won't bore you with the specifics. In fact, I'm going to wave my hands at you and just make a claim, because explaining it would take a very long time. To wit, quantum repeaters will never allow for communication over longer distances than current QKD schemes unless they incorporate some form of quantum memory. Quantum memory is one of the key ingredients for quantum encryption over distances long enough to be really useful.
The research mentioned in this article is interesting, but it doesn't appear to be at a stage that is practically useful. For quantum memory to be useful, it has to store light (vacuum states) on an order of milliseconds or longer and have a storage/recall rate of better than 50%, and it doesn't look like they're there yet. Still, quantum memory is *the* critical stumbling block in a lot of applications, so it's very exciting to see work being done on it. I fully expect that the first practical quantum memory units are going to win their makers a big fat Nobel prize.
I a;ways thought nature abhorred a vacuum. Perhaps nature just abhors nothing after all.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
...as it's hard to measure nothing. Ask those who insist on printing unsound money.Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So how come anything at the microscale "might lead to advances in quantum encryption" just like any nanoscale work "might lead to new sources of energy", any genomic work "might lead to a cure for cancer" etc? After all, nobody said in in the 1940s, "this invention of the 'transistor' could lead to kids posting videos of their pranks for everyone world wide to view?"
How about just doing pure science for science's sake? Especially on a News for Nerds site?
If they need funding they should indicate that these microvacuums make a good alternative to waterboarding for child terrorists and pornographers.
We've struck a chord, it seems. Actually I would have preferred a measured response because the tone and tempo of your entry won't sustain the thread. In fact it is as unattractive as a flat-chested woman with a sharp trill in her voice.