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.'"

Comments

Keep people in their own cars

[cryfreedomlove]

Developments like this are why I think emphasis on conservation at the expense of research into cheap and clean power generation is misguided. I hear a lot of talk from environmentalists about getting people out of their cars. The real effect of those policies will be to get poor people out of their cars while rich people will continue to enjoy the material advantages that personal transportation offers.

I'd rather research cheap and clean power sources and keep poor people in their cars. That's social justice.

Re:Cold Atom?

[sexconker]

So it's kind of like a figid bitch.

Just because it moves, doesn't mean it's a motor.

[Chemisor]

Let me give you an analogy: consider a container in the shape of half-a-donut, filled with salty water. Let's put a nonconductive barrier in at one point and place two electrodes on either side. Apply a voltage to the electrodes and ions will start moving through the water, sodium to the negative, chlorine to the positive. Although the ions are moving, we don't call this contraption a "motor". You could try to hook something up to the moving ions (good luck!) and try to move it, and if you succeed in this task it might become a motor. Until then I'd be more inclined to used the word "wire", or heck, no particular word at all.

Same in this experiment. So they make a little cage with a laser interference pattern. Then they stick two atoms in it. Apply some alternating voltage and one atom pushes off the other, hops through a series of "cavities", and hits the other atom again from the other side. Gee, somehow I am not terribly impressed. Not only does it do absolutely nothing useful, it can only complete a single revolution. Oh, and let's not forget all the energy expended on maintaining the lattice, and on keeping the atoms cold. That last requirement shows that you can't ever hope to scale this to room temperature - the more kinetic energy the atoms have, the more intense must the laser confinement be.