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Quantum-Tunneling Electrons Could Make Semiconductors Obsolete
Nerval's Lobster writes "The powerful, reliable combination of transistors and semiconductors in computer processors could give way to systems built on the way electrons misbehave, all of it contained in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics. Rather than relying on a predictable flow of electrons that appear to know whether they are particles or waves, the new approach depends on quantum tunneling, in which electrons given the right incentive can travel faster than light, appear to arrive at a new location before having left the old one, and pass straight through barriers that should be able to hold them back. Quantum tunneling is one of a series of quantum-mechanics-related techniques being developed as possible replacements for transistors embedded in semiconducting materials such as silicon. Unlike traditional transistors, circuits built by creating pathways for electrons to travel across a bed of nanotubes are not limited by any size restriction relevant to current manufacturing methods, require far less power than even the tiniest transistors, and do not give off heat or leak electricity as waste products, according to Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University, lead author of a paper describing the technique, which was published in the journal Advanced Materials last week."
You mean the 1950s are back? Tunnel diodes were supposed to rule the world back then too! How exciting!
Can't the slashdot editors be more active with their copy? Nothing goes faster than light. period.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
We won't see this tech for at least 20 years before it get's applied to consumer products, if at all.
OTOH, it is exciting to see the kinds of research being done that will advance computing beyond our wildest dreams.
Light travels faster than light all the time. It propagates at different rates depending on the medium, DERP.
Look, it's not a religion, you were taught a set of beliefs and you refuse to question them. Why?
period.
Phase velocity exceeds c, not group velocity. If you guys wanna prove Einstein wrong, you're gonna have to work a little harder.
quantum tunneling, in which electrons given the right incentive can travel faster than light,
I know stuff can go faster than light, provided no information does, but I am not sure that happens in tunneling. Does it?
Dear OP, transistors are f****** semiconductors! The rest of the article is at best starry-eyed fantasy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wrong. Tunneling is instantaneous and it is a well-established mechanism. It has severe distance limits and the question is whether it can transfer information FTL.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You can't, by definition, transgress the laws of physic. If you think you transgressed such a law, your observation is wrong or what you know about the laws is wrong. Either way, you should not say you "transgressed the laws of physic". Please stop doing it.
You seem not to have understood the difference between science and religion.
In science, we don't currently have a theory for faster than light travel ... except of course for entangled particles whose properties appear to propagate with infinite velocity. This doesn't mean that we won't have a theory that covers FTL in future. Only religion has such a priori absolutes. Science embraces anything that reality feels like manifesting to us.
There is no "period".
He wants his junction back
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Looks like VortexCortex needs to look up the definition of Quantum Tunneling. BWHHAHAHAHA
OH IS THAT ALL?
Well, seeing then how certain critically relevant computer science/mathematical limits on certain fundamental characterstics of information are OPEN PROBLEMS, then it follows that it is likewise an OPEN UNRESOLVED issue whether relativity settles FTL (it doesn't).
the problems:
BQP=BPP?
P=NP?
many others that are equivalent
Can't the slashdot editors be more active with their copy? Nothing goes faster than light. period.
Correction: no information travels faster than light. It is easy to imagine a system which looks like something is moving faster than light: shine a bright enough torch on the moon. If you move the torch fast enough it will look like the spot on the Moon is moving faster than light. This is perfectly fine because there is no way to change the where the beam moves if you happen to be where the beam is pointing at a particular time i.e. no information flows between one spot and the next because everything is under the control of the torch wielder back on earth.
In QM tunnelling the transmission speed of information is always below the speed fo light and so there is no problem (if you know secondary [high] school physics this is like the difference between phase velocity and group velocity of a wave in a wave guide). However where the editors messed up is the statement:
...in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics.
These circuit DO NOT warp the basic rules of physics. Quantum mechanics IS a "basic rule of physics" - it is certainly counterintuitive but it is a fundamental rule of physics.
My corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines: If a title has "could" in it, you can replace it with "probably won't".
the problems:
BQP=BPP?
P=NP?
Those problems have nothing to do with speed of propagation of information. Structure of space is not implied by the Turing computation model.
Ralph Sansbury has a very simple explanation for all of this which I'm sure will get shouted down (since that seems to be what people do here for all new ideas) Sansbury suggests through a number of different lines of argumentation that the "speed of light" is really an almost-instantaneous EM signal which, by contrast, slowly propagates through the atomic nucleus into the valence shells, before it registers as a change on an electronic component. If Sansbury was right on this, then the difference between a conventional computer and the quantum computer described below would seem to be that the quantum version would run on the electron subparticles (the "subtrons") -- which it would appear from this press release can be forcibly leaked off of the electron itself by simply trapping it -- the advantage being, apparently, that -- in Sansbury's view, at least -- there is no slow propagation of the EM signal through the valence shells with the subtrons. It just becomes a virtually instantaneous transmission of subtrons. So, is it time to ask if the electron is actually a fundamental particle? It would seem that much weird physics can be reduced to classical explanations with this single idea. He also claims to have demonstrated his idea with a fairly simple experiment See http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/Wallsan.txt I know y'all be hatin, but it is indeed a simple explanation.
Nothing you said made any sense. You took a physics problem and called it equivalent to two computational problems that are unrelated to the physical problem, related to each other, but not in any way equivalent.
"whether relativity settles FTL (it doesn't)" is word soup.
Light travels faster than light all the time. It propagates at different rates depending on the medium, DERP.
You're measuring it wrong. A medium is a layman's term for "shit that light has to bend around and/or bounce off of".
It has already been proved wrong at short distances. See Feynman's lectures on physics and calculation of Feynman's diagrams where you integrate over *all* possible photon speeds, including those below and above c. At quantum levels, photons are random and their speed is random too. If you assume constant speed you'll end up with probabilities of photon-electron interactions that don't match experimental data. Game. Set. Match.
"Our current inductive reasoning gives us overwhelming evidence that nothing has ever been observed traveling faster than light."
Rubbish. Galaxies mentioned below, but even quantum physics has its share of faster than light stuff.
For example a particle travels from A to B at near the speed of light, yet if we try to detect their location half way along it has a probability of being somewhere other than the line between A and B, and if you work out the speed for the new (longer) distance it's faster than light.
An electron can only exist in one orbit or the next, not half way between, so how fast does it need to travel to move? Infinity...
Really, this stuff has become religion, yet its complete garbage.
Particles and light are almost certainly not correct, more likely they're effects of the way we observe stuff. If we can only see big stuff then clumps of little stuff look like big stuff jumping around according to a probability theory.
The starlings effect, is more likely:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE
All of these Quantum physics stuff will likely change, so instead of the equations representing the model, it will represent the *observed*effect* of a *different* model. But to do that we need to get past a lot of religious mumbo jumbo stuff.
Yep, you nailed it. That way you can have a wave propagate it's phase faster than light. The tunnel effect experiments I have seen all relate to this phase velocity. And really nothing new. A wave propagating in a gold or silver film will also see the real part of the refractive index being lower than one, and thus go faster than C. However, information can not go faster than light. The article mentioned here, is just a case of successful scientific advertising. It looks good, sounds good but really nothing new.
Wow, just imagine a beowulf cluster of whatever this article is about...
You could say its NEO. But as the Double slit experiment shows everyone is capable of being Neo.
In other worlds, this quantum computer technology will only work if there are no humans to observe.
What the article is not telling is that this technology already exist and in operation. but no human is allowed to observe it.
When I was young kid, in the early 1960's, I visited a ham radio operator a bunch of times. Cool radios, etc. He taught me some key things about tubes, started a long slide into technology that still hasn't stopped. I asked him about transistors. He looked at me somewhat askance and said "yeah, "I heard about them things. Tubes, son. I know tubes." And went back to teaching me about tubes, and resonance, and etc. Outside of his place, I hooked into an NRI electronics course, and spent a summer sucking that down, while running to my older friend Tony to help me with the math. NRI was teaching tubes then too, but they had an excellent section on transistors, and so I grew comfortable with them just as they were becoming interesting and more widely used. Tubes, except for certain specific jobs, just aren't used much now as we all know, and I've always been grateful for my luck in terms of timing; a few years earlier, and I'd have been looking askance at transistors myself. But instead, I've been comfortable with semiconductors right up until they got too small for me to handle (surface mount, trembling hands, etc.) And I know tubes.
The idea that another revolution of similar importance may happen in my lifetime...
Damn. I just feel like one amazingly lucky fellow. :) Now, will I be able to grasp the tech if it makes it to market? That, as they say, remains to be seen. Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wow, just imagine a beowulf cluster of whatever this article is about...
Nope. First you have to say "Yeh, but will it run Linux?
Sorry, I am never good at Physics, but I get the impression that FTL travel is impossible
And TFA is saying that electrons "appear to arrive at a new location before having left the old one"
How can that be possible ?
Current computer architecture is popular, because it is easy to program, circuits are somewhat difficult to design, and cheap to manufacture. A decade ago, the nvidia NV30 GPU cost $400 million to design, on an easier process. It is difficult to design to design 28 nm chips, because of the weird rules for manufacturing. How much will it cost to design an A15 Cortex class microprocessor, using quantum tunnelling devices, on a 5 nm process??? Industry is still using 193 nm light sources. This assumes that tunneling devices are completely predictable.
So, reading that text file (text file? Also, did you count the number of exclamation marks?), this guy did a $1000 experiment which showed that the speed of light, one of the most widely studied and precisely quantities in physics for the last 200 years, is wrong? Right...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
1) no matter how fast you move the torch, you will not see the torch's shadow move faster than the speed of light. The shadow will not be in sync with the torch's position, it will lag behind.
What you said violates the principle you stated, i.e. no information can travel faster than the speed of light. But a shadow could be used like a signalling device, and so if it appears to be moving faster than light, then we would have information transmitted faster than light as well.
2) Quamtum tunneling is indeed faster than light, but if it is used for calculations then it will also violate the principle you stated. I.e. if an electron goes from place A to place B faster than light, then information will have been received faster than light since we will know of that fact.
... and write. All Flash memory only works because of the the tunnel effect.
You basically have a "cell" isolated from the other conductors and by adding a electrical field you can either push or pull electrons into that cell. The isolator between the cell and the conductor is a bit too big for the electrons to actually get or leave there, but with the additional field, the barrier becomes tunelable.
If you now measure your current in the conductor you can determine if there are electrons in the cell or not (as they also have a field that interacts with the flow of electrons in the conductor next to it).
God dammit, can't you fucking idiots even TRY to understand the difference between quantum entanglement and FTL travel? The electron is NOT TRAVELING FASTER THAN LIGHT. It is not traveling at all!
It is appearing in one place and disappearing in another.
IT.... IS.... NOT.... FUCKING.... MOVING....
Jesus H Fucking Christ in a Brothel...
Since Einstein hasn't been proven right, it's not up to anyone to prove him wrong.
Last I checked they were still the "theories" of Relativity.
Except a "theory" is the top of the food chain in having already been proven right. There is no state higher on the path to being a fact.
So yes, the only remaining option after being shown to be correct 100% of the time each and every time, is to be proven wrong.
Problems with c? Try this one weird trick found by a single physicist!
"Will quantum-tunneling electrons make semiconductors obsolete?"
No.
And no doubt their first application will be used to improve governmental surveillance systems.
It's all fine by me, as long as it runs openSUSE.
warp even the most basic rules of physics
Now that is a meaningless phrase if I ever saw one. Could someone explain what the fuck was the submitter thinking while writing this nonsense?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Since Einstein hasn't been proven right
Probably because you can never prove a scientific theory right. You can however repeatedly fail to prove it wrong, and that's been done many many times w/ Einstein's theories.
Unfortunately these threads have degenerated into YASSS (yet another Slashdot science seminar), where a few insightful or useful comments are made, and everyone else is trying to prove they remember or misremember their freshman physics. There has been almost no discussion of the tunneling device, which is a shame because I'd love to hear from people who have a better understanding than me.
What you said violates the principle you stated, i.e. no information can travel faster than the speed of light. But a shadow could be used like a signalling device...
Indeed a shadow could be used as a signalling device but only from the object creating the shadow to the surface on which the shadow lies NOT between two points on the surface where the shadow lies. Same with the torch/laser: it communicates information from the earth to the moon NOT between two points on the moon (unless they signal the earth and then the earth signals back to the moon which, of course, will not be faster than light).
http://fhs-consulting.com/aa1tj/Bobik.html - Bobik; An 80m tunnel diode transmitter that spanned over 1000km its first night out!
http://fhs-consulting.com/aa1tj/mikums.html - Mikums; A one-tunnel diode, 80m transceiver
http://fhs-consulting.com/aa1tj/tunneldiodetransmitter.html - Tunnel Diode Transmitter; An adventure with two dots of dirty Germanium
http://fhs-consulting.com/aa1tj/TDConverter.djvu - Tunnel Diode Converter Circuits; Article by Erich Gottlieb
Have you ever considered the argument that if the Earth was actually rotating around where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, that the system would not actually be stable? This was brought up by Tom Van Flandern. Also, be aware that -- over time -- discrepancies have been found in the mass of the proton, the gravitational constant G and more recently, radioactive decay rates. In some cases -- as in G -- I'm aware that the discrepancies commonly exceeded the error bars; in fact, the error bars appear to actually be getting *larger*. This is supposed to represent a red flag, and it's supposed to lead people to ask new questions. But, what we see instead on sites like Slashdot is the tendency to disbelieve anything -- even simplifying explanations which Occam would approve of -- which are not also believed by authority figures -- who, in turn, are trying to protect their knowledge. Over time, the critics simply stop paying attention to Slashdot. And the people who continue to visit the site simply develop the false impression that there are no critics.
The argument made is really quite simple and elegant: It's that either matter and space are strange, or light is strange. Einstein placed his bet on the former, but look at how little effort has gone into considering the latter. Don't stop thinking, people! The world is far more interesting when you actually engage it, and consider the obvious fact that there are at least a couple of mistakes in our theories that we need to identify.
All open and unresolved problems are not necessarily equivalent. If they were, solving any one of them would provably lead to solving them all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wait...wait... You mean the internet may some day actually be a series of tubes? Mind. Blown.
carry information.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yet another industry article on a potential replacement for silcion transistor technology. Hundereds if not thousands of these in the past decades. Less than one percent of these technologies see commercial success. But we got to keep trying because the rewards could be immense.
Have you ever considered the argument that if the Earth was actually rotating around where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, that the system would not actually be stable?
Gravitational effects also propagate at the speed of light. Thanks for playing. You should read the Wikipedia article on Crank (person). You are perfectly described by it, and this is obvious to everyone else if not you.
Is there anything else we can do to discourage cranks from posting? Some sort of anti-kook spray? How about a stack of undergrad physics texts?
Iv'e had a nice selection of Tunnel Diodes in this little plastic drawer here. They were a big up and coming thing around 1960. Tektronix and others used them for years in circuits that had to have snap-action, real quick, like in time domain reflectometers and sampling scopes, and plain oscilloscope trigger circuits. Seymour Cray even used them in large quantities in some of his 3000-series computers.
Tektronix kept using them in scopes until at least 1980.
Tunnel diodes lost favor as they never figured out a way to lay them down on an IC substrate, or make them useful amplifiers, as with only to wires, it's really hard to separate input and output.
Interesting to hear that quantum tunneling is making a comeback, maybe.
but Gunter Nimtz has used microwave tunneling to send information fast than light, and his experiments have been replicated.
Many researchers are complaining, they don't like the results.
...contained in circuits that warp even the most basic rules of physics.
Well if the laws of physics are getting broken (or "warped") by reality, then they can't very well be the laws of physics. The *laws* of physics, by definition, apply universally. Maybe the headline should be "New circuits might work using well studied quantum effects that are not part of the simplified, 19th century version of physics taught in American high schools"
Really, Adv. Mat editors? T= 0K ? Come on, how hard is it to show the real number, or a best-guess? 0 is not your best guess.
What kind of food chain is that? I thought law was the highest?
A "Law" is at the top of the food chain, not a "theory."
A "theory" becomes "Law" through irrefutable proof.
It's no wonder the world is turning into an idiocracy. People don't even understand the hierarchy of the scientific food chain. Law > Theory > Hypothesis
There's nothing new about this.
The biggest issue: reliability - how long will it work without failing and how robust is it to environmental stress (overvoltage, temperature, shock, etc.) These are why it's been around for 40 years and you still don't see much that uses it. Tunneling is damaging to materials involved and induces defects that cause device failure.
The reason why Flash has a finite endurance limit (which is reliability) is that 1) it operates based on tunneling, and 2) the tunneling causes damage every time you do it, and 3) the damage accumulates until there is a catastrophic failure.
The type of tunneling described is not new in the specifics of the technology either. It's basically from the family of 1-electron and N-electron transistors. It is still a lab curiosity and at least 20 years away from viability in production electronic ICs. The reliability issues make it extra dicey. Generally reliability (usable lifetime) of a device DECREASES monotonically and exponentially with device dimensions. Right now minimal geometry devices have lifetimes of ~10 years. This device is far smaller.
I've spent >10 years in the semiconductor industry specializing in device physics and device reliability in production environments.
It seems that if you were to actually read the stack of textbooks rather than just stare in awe at them, you'd observe that this issue is trickier than you've assumed. From "The Speed of Gravity - What the Experiments Say" by Tom Van Flandern ...
---
"The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. This seemed unacceptable on two counts. In the first place, it seemed to be a form of “action at a distance”. Perhaps no one has so elegantly expressed the objection to such a concept better than Sir Isaac Newton: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it” [ I]. But mediation requires propagation, and finite bodies should be incapable of propagating at infinite speeds since that would require infinite energy. So instantaneous gravity seemed to have an element of magic to it.
The second objection was that we had all been taught that Einstein’s special relativity (SR), an experimentally well-established theory, proved that nothing could propagate in forward time at a speed greater than that of light in a vacuum. Indeed, as astronomers we were taught to calculate orbits using instantaneous forces; then extract the position of some body along its orbit at a time of interest, and calculate where that position would appear as seen from Earth by allowing for the finite propagation speed of light from there to here. It seemed incongruous to allow for the finite speed of light from the body to the Earth, but to take the effect of Earth’s gravity on that same body as propagating from here to there instantaneously. Yet that was the required procedure to get the correct answers.
These objections were certainly not new when I raised them. They have been raised and answered thousands of times in dozens of different ways over the years since general relativity (GR) was set forth in 1916."
[...]
---
I honestly think that there are perhaps reasonable answers and possibly simple explanations to be had for some of these complex questions, but the human desire to appear to know is typically what stands in the way. Those who accumulate a lot of knowledge in some specialty tend to also develop a certain arrogance about them which somehow manages to be "interdisciplinary", even though -- logically -- the rational mind accepts that science is simply too big to know. The Slashdot community actually exemplifies these corrosive effects more than perhaps most other communities (although the BAUT Forum probably retains its proper place as king of corrosive attitudes).
It's too bad, really, because science is actually far more fun when it is done with an actual "scientific attitude" -- which is an actual construct that people refer to, and necessarily involves being open-minded. In fact, it turns out that the scientific attitude is the only thing which protects the inferential step from the psychological and social forces which govern our more mundane thoughts and activities. By refusing to keep an open mind, and adopting a snap judgment that there is no controversy when there in fact is, you simply turn science into a biased human activity (akin to a reality TV show actually). Multiply you by the millions of others like you, and there becomes so much noise that the actual critical thinkers become buried in the pile of junk.
As for me, I've stopped reading Slashdot many years ago because of the hordes of people like yourself. There are far better communities out there when it comes to critical thinking.
Q: What's the difference between a quantum mechanic and an auto mechanic?
A: A quantum mechanic can get his car into the garage without opening the door.
Note: When I thought that joke up over 35 years ago, there was little risk that "Auto mechanic" would be misconstrued as referring to an autonomous programmed agent, except in Science Fiction.