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New State of Matter Could Extend Moore's Law
rennerik writes "Scientists at McGill University in Montreal say they've discovered a new state of matter that could help extend Moore's Law and allow for the fabrication of more tightly packed transistors, or a new kind of transistor altogether. The researchers call the new state of matter 'a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal.' It was discovered using a device cooled to a temperature about 100 times colder than intergalactic space, following the application of the most powerful continuous magnetic field on Earth."
Extend it? I trust you mean CONFIRM IT YET AGAIN!
Thought so.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081021185213.htm
From comments in TFA:
The researcher, Dr. Guillaume Gervais, is director of McGill University's Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. There's nothing in the journal letter about "a new state of matter". The McGill Newsroom article quotes him as saying to the interviewer, "It's actually not quite 3-D, it's an in-between state, a totally new phenomenon" as compared with the 2-D electron crystals that transistors and IC chips are made of. The interviewer, or an editor, thought "Physics -- state -- new state of matter". Engadget's Melanson picked up the error and passed it on uncritically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum
Intersteller space has a density of a million atoms per cubic meter. Intergalactic space has densities closer to one atom per cubic meter. Perfect vacuum is theoretically impossible due to quantum mechanics (I can not explain why, but that makes sense).
TFA doesn't state any specific temperature, but I find the analogy to how "cold" space is rather troubling. Space is really "warm", as it contains energy left from the Big Bang (although no one with a common sense would describe it that way in daily talk), and saying that something is so many times colder than space really just doesn't make sense. You can always compare sizes, but as heat is a positive size, because you can't have negative energy, you can just say "this is a hundred times hotter than that" or "my freezer is two times as cold as my refrigerator compared to my living room". The one who thought of this analogy could be talking about degrees on Celsius or Fahrenheit, but then those numbers must be way below absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin, as space is just 2.7 Kelvin, or -270.7 C ( http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_ht.html ) and taking for granted he is comparing the temperature of space to 0 ÂC, that means that those crystals are actually -27070 C. And _that_ would be some real frontpage material...
You seem confused. He speaks of "a temperature about 100 times colder than intergalactic space". Intergalactic space has a temperature of about 3K. It does not make sense to talk of degrees C, since C is not an absolute scale. 100 times colder than 3K is 0.03K.
If you did have it in your office, there's not much danger of it blowing up, but the vacuum pumps would be pretty loud.
Intergalactic space is about 2 or 3 Kelvin. Getting down to 100 times colder than that - 20 or 30 millikelvin - requires a Helium 3 dilution fridge. Helium 3 is a rare (and expensive) helium isotope. Physics labs can afford this sort of equipment, but we're not going to be using the setup for gaming anytime soon.
Not to mention, the vacuum pumps, the cold trap and the helium storage system would probably take up most of the space in your cubicle anyway.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
You don't need matter to have a temperature. Even in a "perfect" vacuum (i.e. nothing but quantum fluctuation transient particle-antiparticle pairs) there is still radiant energy in the form of photons - and their wavelength distribution corresponds to a temperature.
It's the temperature at which a black-body test object, bathed continuously in photons of that frequency distribution, would neither warm up nor cool down further.
The radiant temperature of the sky far from the influence of nearby galaxies is known as the "cosmic background temperature". It's about 4 degrees absolute - corresponding to the light from the big bang red-shifted down a LOT by cosmic expansion.
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According to wikipedia, intergalactic space is 2.71 Kelvin. I would assume that they mean "100th the temperature of intergalactic space", not "100 times colder than intergalactic space", as the latter is nonsensical and implies that it exists at 100 times colder than intergalactic space is colder than room temperature, meaning -28834 Kelvin (293 - 100 * (293 - 2.73) where we assume that room temperature is 20 degrees centigrade). This is nonsense.
I don't see a problem with "100 times colder than intergalactic space". Temperature is an absolute scale, like size. It's like saying that item X is "100 times smaller than a coin". You don't then compare the size of the coin (say, 0.01m) to the room (say 3m) and then complain that item X is not of size -296 (3 - 100 * (3 - 0.01)).
but it still works quite well, since 1C == 1K
and i really cringed when i read the 100 times colder crap. Seriously, if it's at 0.03 K why not just say that?
It does not work well. 100x colder than 1 C is not 0.01 C, it is -270.27 C. And the reason people don't say 0.03 K is because the average person does not know what K is, but they know space is very cold.
So when someone says "X is 100 times larger than Y" you instinctively think "X=100*Y", yet when someone says "X is 100 times smaller than Y" you instinctively think "X=Z-100*(Z-Y)" for some arbitrary Z of same unit as Y. Forgive me for not following your erm... logic.
Let's say I have a temperature which is 100 times larger than 27.1 mK, this would be 2.71 K. Indeed 27.1 mK is smaller than 2.71 K and 2.71 K is larger than 27.1 mK. So saying 100 times smaller than 2.71 K should indicate I mean 27.1 mK. In no way is this nonsensical and I'm pretty sure everyone here understands that "X is N times smaller than Y" means multiply Y by the reciprocal of N, similarly "X is N times larger than Y" means multiply Y by N.
Granted this isn't something you'd see in technical writing, but I'm pretty sure Information Week isn't a technical journal, so why be a pedant about it?
Was this moderated Insightful out of irony (I do that all the time when I have the points) or did I miss the joke?
Please do not mod this ironically, because I'm already confused. Thanks.
No, Moore's law states that the number of transistors you can put on an integrated circuit for a fixed cost doubles every 18 months. This has nothing to do with the speed at which the transistors run or the material they are made from.
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Just to make sure everybody knows: The necessary magnetic field and temperature applications are required only during the creation of the crystals.
--Edward Dassmesser