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Blueprint For a Quantum Electric Motor
TechReviewAl writes "Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and colleagues have revealed the blueprints for an electric motor built with just two atoms. The motor would have one neutral atom and one charged atom trapped in a ring-shaped optical lattice. The atoms jump from one site in the lattice to the next as they travel around the ring and placing this ring in an alternating magnetic field creates the conditions necessary to keep the charged atom moving round the the ring. A team from the University of Glasgow in the UK in fact built one of these quantum motors back in 2007, which they called an optical ferris wheel for ultracold atoms. 'The next step, say Ponomarev and co, is to attach the motor to a nanoscopic resonator, such as a spring board or nanomushroom, and make it vibrate. If you can do that, they say, you'd be powering a classical object using a quantum motor.'"
maybe you're a dumb faggot
How exactly is this quantum? Does it spin in both ways at once?
"In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is an indivisible entity of a quantity that has the same units as the Planck constant and is related to both energy and momentum of elementary particles of matter (called fermions) and of photons and other bosons." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum
What makes you think something has to spin both ways at once to be quantum?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
They didn't say the whole system was two atoms, they said the motor is two atoms. The motor is the component that turns a non-mechanical energy potential into mechanical motion. The cooling system, the device that produces the magnetic field, etc. are no more part of the motor than the gas tank and radiator are part of the internal combustion engine.
An Optical Lattice is a complicated array of lasers that create a egg carton like potential for the atoms (the atoms interact with the lasers via the Stark shift iirc). The idea is that the atoms then get "trapped" in the minima of this potential [well, they are still tunneling and all that].
Via the wavelength of the lasers and their intensity one can control "depth" of the potential wells and the spacing of the lattice, which is quite nice, because you get essentially a solid state system where you can change those parameters "on the fly", thus enabling studies of insulator-conductor transitions and whatnot.
And little games like that in TFA, of course.