Chemistry isn't as nearly as 'cool' as these pretty make-fire videos lead one to believe. Every explosion a young chemist commits brings them closer and closer the sad reality of their career later in life, performing volumetric titrations day in day out in labs with limited ventilation and no capacity to do dumb shit with metal sodium. Chemists are nothing more than glorified, poor cooks who use class 'A' glassware.
I actually can't figure out where all the hype is coming from with quantum dots.
They have interesting biomedical applications as fluorophores in cellular imaging and molecular detection. They have advantages to organic dyes traditionally used in imaging applications, as they're tunable, have highly specific emission ranges, very high quantum yields and are resistant to photobleaching. Precise measurements of changes in biomolecules can be measured with quantum dots, such as detection of fluorescence intensity changes of Förster resonance energy transfer processes. However, the use of QDs isn't revolutionary, and they're not exactly cheap to make (a quick trip to the Invitrogen website, searching for their 'QDot' line of products illustrates this).
The technical difficulties that still have to be ironed out with quantum dots, such as the 'blinking' problem (likely due to some sort of twist on Auger photoionization) makes them useless in single-molecule excitation situations (which I'm sure would be necessary to control in any sort of storage environment). At this point, numerous problems stand in our way of making them the wonderful solution described in these articles. Their toxicity, steps required to ensure proper surface passivation, limited solubility in aqueous medium without extensive modification to their surface, etc...
Temperature's relationship with motion and energy of particles, as described by the equipartition theorem, does not define temperature. Negative absolute temperature can exist in systems with a finite number of states.
For example, laser action is achieved by a population inversion; parts more than fifty percent of the system is in an excited state. Based upon the entropic definition of temperature, lasers have negative absolute temperature.
Statistical thermodynamics makes temperature definitions very messy, as negative absolute temperatures are 'hotter' than infinite kelvin.
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You 'll have to pry Abramowitz and Stegun out of my cold, dead hands.
Chemistry isn't as nearly as 'cool' as these pretty make-fire videos lead one to believe. Every explosion a young chemist commits brings them closer and closer the sad reality of their career later in life, performing volumetric titrations day in day out in labs with limited ventilation and no capacity to do dumb shit with metal sodium. Chemists are nothing more than glorified, poor cooks who use class 'A' glassware.
I actually can't figure out where all the hype is coming from with quantum dots. They have interesting biomedical applications as fluorophores in cellular imaging and molecular detection. They have advantages to organic dyes traditionally used in imaging applications, as they're tunable, have highly specific emission ranges, very high quantum yields and are resistant to photobleaching. Precise measurements of changes in biomolecules can be measured with quantum dots, such as detection of fluorescence intensity changes of Förster resonance energy transfer processes. However, the use of QDs isn't revolutionary, and they're not exactly cheap to make (a quick trip to the Invitrogen website, searching for their 'QDot' line of products illustrates this). The technical difficulties that still have to be ironed out with quantum dots, such as the 'blinking' problem (likely due to some sort of twist on Auger photoionization) makes them useless in single-molecule excitation situations (which I'm sure would be necessary to control in any sort of storage environment). At this point, numerous problems stand in our way of making them the wonderful solution described in these articles. Their toxicity, steps required to ensure proper surface passivation, limited solubility in aqueous medium without extensive modification to their surface, etc...
Given that quantum dot 'blinking' seems to be stochastic, I don't see how quantum dots could be utilized for reliable RAM.
Temperature's relationship with motion and energy of particles, as described by the equipartition theorem, does not define temperature. Negative absolute temperature can exist in systems with a finite number of states. For example, laser action is achieved by a population inversion; parts more than fifty percent of the system is in an excited state. Based upon the entropic definition of temperature, lasers have negative absolute temperature. Statistical thermodynamics makes temperature definitions very messy, as negative absolute temperatures are 'hotter' than infinite kelvin.