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Yale Physicists Measure 'Persistent Current'
eldavojohn writes "Modern processors rely on wires mere nanometers wide, and now Yale physicists have successfully measured a theoretical 'persistent current' that flows through them when they are formed into rings. The researchers predict this will help us understand how electrons behave in metals — more specifically, the quantum mechanical effect that influences how these electrons move through the metals. Hopefully, this work will shed new light on what dangers (or uses) quantum effects could have on classical processors as the inner workings shrink in size. The breakthrough involved rethinking how to measure this theoretical effect, as they previously relied on superconducting quantum interference devices to measure the magnetic field such a current would create — complicated devices that gave incorrect and inconsistent measurements. Instead, they turned to nothing but mechanical devices, known as cantilevers ('little floppy diving boards with the nanometer rings sitting on top'), that yielded measurements with a full order of magnitude more precision."
The problem is not heat dissipation: it is the inefficiency of our computational machinery.
Logic devices have almost zero efficiency in that for each watt going in, nothing or almost nothing is used to deliver the logic movement. Almost everything is converted into heat, or physical motion.
So... 500 watts into a server is 500 watts of heat to dissipate... and zero watts of computing (whatever that would be).
What we need is a more efficient computing design.
An applied voltage accelerates electrons. In the absence of anything slowing them down, like interactions with atoms where they lose energy, no voltage should be required for them to keep moving forever.
So the result of this experiment raises the question: Why are these electrons not interacting with anything? We have some good ideas about why they don't in superconducting materials. So this extends the realm of this behavior into other states of matter. Or its new behavior.
Have gnu, will travel.