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Diamonds Key To Quantum Computing
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Scientists P. Neumann, N. Mizuochi & co. have advanced quantum computing by finding a new method to get two-way and three-way, high quality quantum correlations that persist for hundreds or thousands of microseconds, even at room temperature. Their paper (subscription required) describes how they manipulated electrons from nitrogen vacancies in diamond using microwaves to entangle adjacent carbon-13 nuclei. Even better, this builds on previous results which indicate that diamonds with nitrogen impurities may be the key to creating useful quantum computing devices. The article provides a good description of what nitrogen vacancies are and why they prove useful."
How nice now... The first quantum computer on the market will have to use diamonds.... So what will that mean? A $8 million price tag?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I gather now with the ability to create diamonds in the lab, the need for quantum computers might force more people to make them. I don't know if there will be a crash in the diamond market soon (there are ways to tell natural diamonds from lab made ones but it can be difficult) but it will be interesting to watch.
So now diamonds are a supercomputer's best friend?
"Quantum diamonds are forever. Or are they?" --Lord Nimula
If the end result is to work with nitrogen, why are they using "diamonds"? I am sure there are better containers that can be worked on.
Diamond computers.
Who cares if they work? People will buy them anyway.
From Wikipedia: "LifeGem is the world's first company offering to synthesize diamonds from the carbonized remains of people or pets."
Just another possibility for useful recycling.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Maybe they should try with dilithium crystals.
Ok, you go get all the high tech expedition stuff, and I'll teach the gorilla sign language, then lets go get em!
But do NOT pack any damned shaped charges!
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
... for hundreds of thousands of microseconds.
We need to figure out how to make our control crystals less susceptible to Zat'n'ktel fire and resistant to staff blasts before production.
Oh, and we might need to consider locking the compartments that hold our control crystals...
When diamonds are a nerds best friend.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
The article didn't address the impact of using carbon with an unlucky number of whatever super tiny particles people in labcoats found in there. Considering the number of such carbons there would be in a commercial quantum computer, the effective radius of bad luck could be miles. Bring one of these computers home, and you could drown your whole neighborhood into misery. I reckon more research is needed.
is in my laptop? They could also make these artificially, putting in the precise concentration and distribution of nitrogen. All I heard was 'Quantum Computer' and 'persists for a real amount of time' and 'room temperature.'
while(1) { fork(); };
Science should be done with free, open sharing of the results, so that anyone, anywhere, can read the details and possibly come up with the next idea.
These subscription journals are holding back science.
The service of organizing peer-review is logically independent
of whether something is in a limited distribution paid, paper
journal. Sell google ads on the things if you must, dammit.
I know its a bit offtopic but it pisses me off royally.
Science is above all else about building shared knowledge.
Period. If you're putting your findings behind firewalls,
you are harming science.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Reading quickly, I misread: "finding a new method to get two-ways and three-ways" ...
The dissapointment is crushing
no opensource science isn't the cash cow that brings in R&D$ its all about the money always has been always will be.
Science is above all else about building shared knowledge.
So quantum computing is science now? Has anybody ever observed superposed quantum states? I don't think so. QC is based on an unobserved interpretation of QM. It's based on a conjecture. It is not science as science is defined. And the fact that this crap is being published in peer-reviewed journals does not say much about the sanctity of peer review. When someone shows me a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time, I will believe in QC. Until then, it is just pure unmitigated hogwash and voodoo superstition.
Peer review is an incestuous mechanism whose purpose is to keep outsiders at bay. Science is thus immune to public criticism and ends up feeding on itself, producing monsters. Paul Feyerabend was right when he wrote in 'Against Method' that "the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size and give them a more modest position in society." Some so-called scientists should be ashamed of themselves.
Makes me mad too, and despite a law (IIRC) that all results of govt funded research be free -- they sure aren't. I am an "amateur" researcher in alternative energy (www.coultersmithing.com) and found that to get access to back issues of Rev Sci Instruments you have to pay on the order of $60k AFTER DISCOUNTS to get such access to this almost purely government funded research. Of course, this comes in a bundled package with a lot of junk that would make any cable company green with envy. How much does it cost again to dupe a disk drive and mail it?
The AIP is against real science, only for maintaining a system for tenured jerkoffs sucking my tax dollars for their own benefit.
Write your congressman and complain! We paid for this once already, and it's not like the authors had any choice in a publish or perish world not to sign off on the dumb copyright contracts AIP enforces on their pubs.
It's as though the government has established a good ol boy system to keep results away from anyone who might use them to compete with the big guys who can buy this stuff with lunch money, and then donate the rest to campaigns. No enforcement will ever happen until enough of us complain, loudly, and not with some form letter from a PAC.
I agree with you entirely. But note that while you are a graduate student (and undergrad too in most cases) you have access to 99.99% of all Journals through your universities resources (library, and online in my case). This is how it is in Canada anyway. I find it strange in general that they charge money. It must be for the corporations that have no academic ties and can afford to fork over the money. Anyway, information wants to be free. As far as I'm concerned, education should be free from Grade 1 to Post-Doctorate. This includes textbooks and journal papers.
...am looking forward to quantum computing. This way, my system files on Windows will both have a rootkit and not have a rootkit at the same time!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The most annoying part is that Google indexes it all. It's what I call the "undead internet".
Try a specialised search for any science subject. Often the first two or three pages are links to zombie content, abstracts from journals, patent holding companies, JStor, Elsevier, IEEE etc that you cannot actually access the content. There are papers for sale, some for over $100.
Many of these leeches not only charge the reader, they charge the author to publish too.
But Google seems to either index _the _actual_content_ or has been SEO'd on every keyword very heavily - and yet you cannot actually read anything. This is very frustrating. As an ordinary internet user I feel like a second class citizen. Bugmenot is occasionally useful, but more often than not I simply find the exact paper I want to read but am fobidden from reading it.
Consequently I cite only sources that are actually available to the public and leave those who write for the gatekeepers of knowledge to obscurity.
Thankfully I am aware there is a growing backlash in all corners of the scientific community to boycott these journals and publish through publicly accessible sources. The problem is with certain orthodox institutions requiring publications in these archaic forms knowing they have sold out science. Hopefully they will also be swept aside in the years to come.
Can someone please tag this as "Zardoz" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/?
Thanks
Could you please build my quantum computer with cubic zirconia instead? I'm kinda on a tight budget. :-/
You know, it's only a matter of time before we run into the silverback gorillas with stone paddles in the Congo.
Has anyone noticed that people are getting tired of all this quantum computing bullshit? Most of the posts below are just making fun of it all. QC is crap. Get over it. It is a big fucking lie that just refuses to go away as long as those fraudsters keep getting funding from us suckers, i.e., the public. I wish Slashdot would stop running stories about QC anymore. Only wild-eyed Star-Trek fanatics care and they don't count. Whoever promises to slash all funding for QC gets my vote in November. LOL.
Deciding on what subscriptions to pay for is a major part of research library management, and consumes a significant portion of the annual budget. Just because you get access included with your tuition/state funding/whatever doesn't mean it's cheap.
Anyway, it's not a no-cost proposition to run a journal, either. The fees aren't just a license to print money, although they may be higher than is completely justifiable. Still, a prestigious journal like Nature has a lot of overhead, relative to the readership. We're not talking about an issue of Newsweek that's going into every doctor's office in America. (It's one of the same reasons why textbooks cost more than, say, Harry Potter 7.)
You can make an argument that it can be done cheaper (or even for free), but it's harder to make the argument that the money is just wasted.
That's the tricky part of running a research group - you want to publish your results in order get enough citations/references in other papers, in order to get further funding. But if you give away too much information, someone else can just set up a competing research department and take away your funding, so you end up having to start from scratch again.
So your survival tactic is to create a research group as large as possible to keep up the production of papers and the number of directions you can go in, or to investigate an area that nobody else has any interest in.
Having an expensive subscription for these research papers is one way to get the references, but reduce the risk of losing your funding.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I already knew that diamonds are the key to getting a three-way.
If you google search hard enough, you can usually find these papers free of charge from the originating university, either in the author's own website, or from a departmental archive.
I'm at an university, and even with a free Athens login from the campus library, our university still doesn't have a subscription to one or two of these companies. Basically, the subscription managers at the library will get a free trial or purchase a 1 years license with one of these companies. If enough papers are referenced, then the subscription is maintained, otherwise it is dropped.
Many research fields form their own cliques where they reference each others papers, and none from anybody else. If you are not in this clique, then it isn't worth taking out a subscription to that journal.
Fortunately, it is possible to get the jist of an unreadable paper by reading the descriptions from other papers.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ug, why are people thinking diamonds should be expensive anymore?
I know I'm posting this AC'ly, but hell I've seen diamond (brick sized) bricks produced out of that guy from the US Navy east coast plant.
What the fuck ever happened to him anyway - I kind of lost track. His techniques sure made artificial impurity free diamond easily enough, according to any test I ran anyway.
This was the major problem with the cartels - they were too damned pure according to various tests down to mass spectroscopy. He sure as hell seemed paranoid enough to avoid being 'dissapeared'.
i totally agree with you in principle, but like most things in life, without a financial incentive, there wouldn't be any scientific journals to publish in. who would run the journals - your tax-dollars? the researchers who publish in them? maybe some sort of advertising system would work... how annoying, though. good ideas are most welcome.
Read it ages ago (long before the disappointing movie) but I seem to remember something about blue diamonds in the book "Congo" and the race to get them because they meant the fastest defense network or something like that? So that means Skynet will run on diamonds right?
Petium XXIV - Diamond Edition
.005 karat x 1,024 cores = 5.12 total karats @ 1tflops/Kt = .5 LoC/ps memory throughput
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
Some universities have policies that their professors should retain copyright if possible (and therefore post the papers on their own websites). If enough [big] universities push the issue, then hopefully the issue will get resolved.
However, it costs (according to Physical Review) more than $1000 to publish an article. There is a lot of typesetting, they might pay reviewers, and they have to be reliable.
Everyone at a university gets free access to the articles anyway, through their library proxy.
I've just written an assignment on a Phys. Rev article, actually, and did you know that you can now pay ~$1300 and make an article public?
Well yeah, we'd all like stuff to be free. Why should science be treated so specially in this regard?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
As with all things Quantum, its a model of what could be known.
My Mum has already achieved what you're after
Mom "but it didn't have a virus before you looked at it!"
I "did it take 30 mins to boot?"
Mom "yes, but it didn't have any virus"
thx e
The last paragraph of TFA is notable:
There are a bunch of different ways to represent a qubit, the fundamental unit of quantum computation. They all have advantages and disadvantages. I myself work with photonic qubits. Using photons it's actually considerably easier to get and hold coherence (high-quality quantum correlations) for as long as you need it than in other representations. But one of the problems with photons* is that they always travel at the speed of light (well der), and while that's great for communication, it's not so good if you actually want to store quantum information somewhere. So finding a good way to keep coherence for a reasonable length of time for something stationary is useful work.
*The other problem with photons is that they are relatively difficult to get to interact with each other. There are only a few situations where there is any appreciable interaction between two photons.
If this had happened a few years ago when I got married, I would have had reason to demand a diamond as well. "But I want to do quantum calculations really really bad!"
Of course, 3 mos her salary vs 3 mos my salary would have bought me about as much diamond quantum computing as I got at the time anyways. Se la vi.
QC is based on a stupid conjecture (the Copenhagen interpretation of QM) that can never be observed. That is not science. It's voodoo crap, dead/alive cats and all that other jazz. Physicists don't even have a clue as to why quantum interactions are probabilistic and yet they feel qualified to conjecture that quantum states are superposed? Who you're fooling? Time travel believers and Star-Trek groupies maybe, but not anybody with more than two neurons between their ears. All the announcements we've been hearing about x qbits having been done in the lab are pure 100% bullshit. And you can take that to the bank.
In conclusion, DWave + David Deutsch = Snake oil salesmen. LOL.
It's worse than that, actually. I find it interesting that the research work described in most of these published papers are funded with the taxpayers money, then they also have to pay (indirectly) for the scientists to have those papers published in these peer-reviewed journals, then they have to pay yet again for the universities and institutes to have subscription access to (some of) these publications (so the scientists can read them) and, in the end, if the taxpayer is a layman/hobbyist with no free access to these publications through universities and such, he has to pay _yet_ again to read the results of the research he has paid for in the first place.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? I think not.
rock on!
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
The girl I marry will either be:
A)A gorgeous airhead blonde who won't know that fake diamonds exist.
B)A classy girl who knows that buying real diamonds hurts lots of people and wouldn't want one.
C)Someone in between, who has me so whipped that I'd buy her a ring made out of my own spleen, and Microsoft Quality Assurance Licence (40 seat Enterprise version) to boot.
With any luck, constant programming will either ruin my eyesight to the point where option B becomes realistic, or result in the creation of a real holo-deck, making the whole issue mute.