Sunday, June 3, 2007

53. Hardware

(computer hardware materials)

Computers are a very polluting industry. They got much less polluting with this option: glass memory. Plus, it solves other material category difficulties for information storage that humans have always had for thousands of years. It's great for the consumer and culture in general since archival purposes are solved for the digital era completely. It's hard to overstate the importance of this development for the human species in general culturally as much as the importance for the environment. Stop people from telling you we 'have to' degrade the environment to live on this planet. To say so is just someone's ignorance of our options to settle for an ongoing bad material history when we can have now a much better material future--and a durable cultural memory for the species at last.


Superman 'memory crystals' to become a reality as scientists store computer data on powerful glass hard drive
By Daniel Bates
15th August 2011

Computer users could soon be saving their work onto hard drives made of glass after scientists developed ‘memory crystals’ similar to those in the Superman films.

Researchers have used laser beams to alter glass and make it possible to store memory inside, just as Clark Kent does in his Fortress of Solitude.

They say the crystals will be able to store much more than conventional hard drives and are less prone to overheating or damage.

Poweful memory database: The process works by putting tiny dots called 'voxels' into pure silica glass which changes the way light moves through it

At home: Researchers have used laser beams to alter glass and make it possible to store memory inside, just as Clark Kent does in his Fortress of Solitude

Currently the glass shards can store up to 50GB of data, the equivalent of a whole Blu-ray Disc, on a piece the size of a mobile phone screen.

They can also withstand temperatures of up to 1,800F and last for thousands of years without the quality of the data stored degrading.

The process works by putting tiny dots called ‘voxels’ into pure silica glass which changes the way light moves through it.

These voxels can then be read using an optical decoder, allowing the user to write or delete data as often as they like.

Lead research Martynas Beresna, of Southampton University's optoelectronics research centre, said: ‘We have developed this memory which means data can be stored on the glass and last for ever. It could become a very stable and safe form of portable memory.

‘It could be very useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan.

‘Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit.'

The researchers are now working with a Lithuanian company to market the crystals.

In the Superman film series, the Fortress of Solitude was created by a crystal placed aboard a spacecraft Superman is put on to escape the war on his home planet of Krypton.

The teenage Clark Kent ends up in an ice field thought to be in the Arctic and when he throws it into the floor it becomes a cavernous crystal complex.

The memory crystals contain holograms and sound recordings of Superman’s parents Jor-El and Lara which are accessed by placing a glass ‘memory stick’ into a glass pipe.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2026274/Superman-memory-crystals-reality-scientists-store-data-powerful-glass-hard-drive.html

What about graphene?


What is Graphene?
6 min.



Ideas of flexible graphene:
2 min.



The wonder stuff that could change the world: Graphene is so strong a sheet of it as thin as clingfilm could support an elephant

By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 7:39 AM on 7th October 2011

Revolutionary: Graphene, which is formed of honeycomb pattern of carbon atoms, could be the most important new material [transparent, electric, and strong building material as well] material for a century [it's a completely unique mixture of consumptive categories in this material: a thin, transparent, super-strong (harder than diamond) structural building material that has electrical conduction properties better than copper (copper is hardly a structural material), though graphene's lack of semiconductor principles may make it difficult for some fantasy computer operations that currently are based on mostly silicon's physical capacities of 'on/off' switching in the material itself (there are other options for this switching though than polluting silicon industries: see the category on communication materials for more options); thus with graphene always 'on' in other words, and very efficiently so, it makes it difficult to do any anticipated Boolean/operations in the material itself in base 2--the insight of all computers from Shannon onward.]

Revolutionary: Graphene, which is formed of honeycomb pattern of carbon atoms, could be the most important new material for a century

It is tougher than diamond, but stretches like rubber. It is virtually invisible, conducts electricity and heat better than any copper wire and weighs next to nothing. Meet graphene — an astonishing new material which could revolutionise almost every part of our lives.

Some researchers claim it’s the most important substance to be created since the first synthetic plastic more than 100 years ago.

If it lives up to its promise, it could lead to mobile phones that you roll up and put behind your ear, high definition televisions as thin as wallpaper, and bendy electronic newspapers that readers could fold away into a tiny square.

It could transform medicine, and replace silicon as the raw material used to make computer chips [perhaps everything except this however, see note above.]

The ‘miracle material’ was discovered in Britain just seven years ago, and the buzz around it is extraordinary.

Last year, it won two Manchester University scientists the Nobel Prize for physics, and this week Chancellor George Osborne pledged £50 million towards developing technologies based on the super-strong substance.

In terms of its economics, one of the most exciting parts of the graphene story is its cost. Normally when scientists develop a new wonder material, the price is eye-wateringly high.

But graphene is made by chemically processing graphite — the cheap material in the ‘lead’ of pencils.
Every few months researchers come up with new, cheaper ways of mass producing graphene, so that some experts believe it could eventually cost less than £4 per pound.

But is graphene really the wonder stuff of the 21st century?

For a material with so much promise, it has an incredibly simple chemical structure. A sheet of graphene is just a single layer of carbon atoms, locked together in a strongly-bonded honeycomb pattern.

Pledge: George Osborne, pictured visiting the University of Manchester lab where graphene is being researched, has said £50m will be set aside to help with development of technologies based on the substance

That makes it the thinnest material ever made. You would need to stack three million graphene sheets on top of each other to get a pile one milimetre high. It is also the strongest substance known to mankind — 200 times stronger than steel and several times tougher than diamond.


A sheet of graphene as thin as clingfilm could hold the weight of an elephant. In fact, according to one calculation, an elephant would need to balance precariously on the end of a pencil to break through that same sheet.

Despite its strength, it is extremely flexible and can be stretched by 20 per cent without any damage.

It is also a superb conductor of electricity — far better than copper, traditionally used for wiring — and is the best conductor of heat on the planet.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of graphene is where it comes from. Graphene is made from graphite, a plentiful grey mineral mostly mined in Chile, India and Canada.

A pencil lead is made up of many millions of layers of graphene. These layers are held together only weakly — which is why they slide off each other when a pencil is moved across the page.

Graphene was first isolated by Professors Konstantin Novoselov and Andrew Geim at Manchester University in 2004. The pair used sticky tape to strip away thin flakes of graphite, then attached it to a silicon plate which allowed the researchers to identify the tiny layers through a microscope.

Discovery: Professors Andre Geim, left, and Dr Konstantin Novoselov first isolated graphene in 2004. They later won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year

Russian-born Prof Novoselov, 37, believes graphene could change everything from electronics to computers.

‘I don’t think it has been over-hyped,’ he said. ‘It has attracted a lot of attention because it is so simple — it is the thinnest possible matter — and yet it has so many unique properties.

‘There are hundreds of properties which are unique or superior to other materials. Because it is only one atom thick it is quite transparent — not many materials that can conduct electricity which are transparent.’

Its discovery has triggered a boom for material science. Last year, there were 3,000 research papers on its properties, and 400 patent applications.

The electronics industry is convinced graphene will lead to gadgets that make the iPhone and Kindle seem like toys from the age of steam trains.

Modern touch-sensitive screens use indium tin oxide — a substance that is transparent but which carries electrical currents. But indium tin oxide is expensive, and gadgets made from it shatter or crack easily when dropped. Replacing indium tin oxide with graphene-based compounds could allow for flexible, paper-thin computer and television screens. South Korean researchers have created a 25in flexible touch-screen using graphene.

Ancient history: If the development of graphene is successful it will make the iPad and Kindle seem like toys from the age of the steam train

Imagine reading your Daily Mail on a sheet of electric paper. Tapping a button on the corner could instantly update the contents or move to the next page. Once you’ve finished reading the paper, it could be folded up and used afresh tomorrow.

Other researchers are looking at many ways of using graphene in medicine. It is also being touted as an alternative to the carbon-fibre bodywork of boats and bikes [and car tires?] Graphene in tyres could make them stronger.

Some even claim it will replace the silicon in computer chips. In the future, a graphene credit card could store as much information as today’s computers.

‘We are talking of a number of unique properties combined in one material which probably hasn’t happened before,’ said Prof Novoselov. ‘You might want to compare it to plastic. But graphene is as versatile as all the plastics put together.

‘It’s a big claim, but it’s not bold. That’s exactly why there are so many researchers working on it.’

Dr Sue Mossman, curator of materials at the Science Museum in London, says graphene has parallels with Bakelite — the first man-made plastic, invented in 1907.

Resistant to heat and chemicals, and an excellent electrical insulator, Bakelite easily made electric plugs, radios, cameras and telephones.

‘Bakelite was the material of its time. Is this the material of our times?’ she says. ‘Historically we have been really good at invention in this country, but we’ve been really bad at capitalising on it.’

If graphene isn’t to go the same way as other great British inventions which were never properly exploited commercially at home — such as polythene and carbon fibre — it will need massive investment in research and development.

Core material: Graphene comes from a base material of graphite and is so thin that three millions sheets of the substance would be needed to make a layer 1mm thick

That’s why the Government’s move to support its development in the UK got a warm round of applause at the Conservative Party conference.

But compared to the investment in graphene in America and Asia, the £50 million promised by the Chancellor is negligible. South Korea is investing £195million into the technology. The European Commission is expected to invest one billion euros into graphene in the next ten years.

Yet despite the flurry of excitement, many researchers doubt graphene can live up to such high expectations.

It wouldn’t be the first wonder material that failed to deliver. In 1985 another form of carbon, called fullerenes or buckyballs, was hailed as the revolutionary new material of the era. Despite the hype, there has yet to be a major practical application.

And there are already some problems with using graphene. It is so good at conducting electricity that turning it into devices like transistors — which control the flow of electrical currents, so need to be able to stop electricity flowing through them — has so far proved problematic.

Earlier this year computer company IBM admitted that it was ‘difficult to imagine’ graphene replacing silicon in computer chips.

And sceptics point out that most new materials — such as carbon-fibre — take 20 years from invention before they can be used commercial use.

You might think from all the hype, that the road to a great graphene revolution has already been mapped out.

But its future is far from certain. In fact it’s barely been penciled out in rough.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2045825/Graphene-strong-sheet-clingfilm-support-elephant.html#ixzz1aMt2nBVJ


3.

Quantum computer built inside a diamond
April 4, 2012

Diamonds are forever – or, at least, the effects of this diamond on quantum computing may be. A team that includes scientists from USC has built a quantum computer in a diamond, the first of its kind to include protection against "decoherence" – noise that prevents the computer from functioning properly.

The demonstration shows the viability of solid-state quantum computers, which – unlike earlier gas- and liquid-state systems – may represent the future of quantum computing because they can be easily scaled up in size. Current quantum computers are typically very small and – though impressive – cannot yet compete with the speed of larger, traditional computers.

The multinational team included USC Professor Daniel Lidar and USC postdoctoral researcher Zhihui Wang, as well as researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Iowa State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their findings will be published on April 5 in Nature.

The team's diamond quantum computer system featured two quantum bits (called "qubits"), made of subatomic particles.

As opposed to traditional computer bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero, qubits can encode a one and a zero at the same time. This property, called superposition, along with the ability of quantum states to "tunnel" through energy barriers
, will some day allow quantum computers to perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional computers.

Like all diamonds, the diamond used by the researchers has impurities – things other than carbon. The more impurities in a diamond, the less attractive it is as a piece of jewelry, because it makes the crystal appear cloudy.

The team, however, utilized the impurities themselves.

A rogue nitrogen nucleus became the first qubit. In a second flaw sat an electron, which became the second qubit. (Though put more accurately, the "spin" of each of these subatomic particles was used as the qubit.)

Electrons are smaller than nuclei and perform computations much more quickly, but also fall victim more quickly to "decoherence." A qubit based on a nucleus, which is large, is much more stable but slower.

"A nucleus has a long decoherence time – in the milliseconds. You can think of it as very sluggish," said Lidar, who holds a joint appointment with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Though solid-state computing systems have existed before, this was the first to incorporate decoherence protection – using microwave pulses to continually switch the direction of the electron spin rotation.

"It's a little like time travel," Lidar said, because switching the direction of rotation time-reverses the inconsistencies in motion as the qubits move back to their original position.

The team was able to demonstrate that their diamond-encased system does indeed operate in a quantum fashion by seeing how closely it matched "Grover's algorithm."

The algorithm is not new – Lov Grover of Bell Labs invented it in 1996 – but it shows the promise of quantum computing.

The test is a search of an unsorted database, akin to being told to search for a name in a phone book when you've only been given the phone number.

Sometimes you'd miraculously find it on the first try, other times you might have to search through the entire book to find it. If you did the search countless times, on average, you'd find the name you were looking for after searching through half of the phone book.

Mathematically, this can be expressed by saying you'd find the correct choice in X/2 tries – if X is the number of total choices you have to search through. So, with four choices total, you'll find the correct one after two tries on average.

A quantum computer, using the properties of superposition, can find the correct choice much more quickly. The mathematics behind it are complicated, but in practical terms, a quantum computer searching through an unsorted list of four choices will find the correct choice on the first try, every time.

Though not perfect, the new computer picked the correct choice on the first try about 95 percent of the time – enough to demonstrate that it operates in a quantum fashion.

Provided by University of Southern California

---
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-quantum-built-diamond.html#firstCmt

21 comments:

Mark said...

INVENTION 5
A brain on a chip

WHAT IT IS: A model of the brain’s pathways on a computer chip

LEAD INVENTOR: Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen, Stanford

SNAPSHOT: To make computers as powerful and efficient as the human brain, Boahen is developing ways to base the design of electronics on our mental circuitry. His circuits combine hardware and software such that the wiring can self-adjust to “learn” new functions. He has already recreated the networks of the retina.

FANTASY APP: Because Boahen’s electronics work like the brain, they may one day form the basis of a prosthetic cortex—yes, an artificial brain.


THE STORY: When Boahen, 41, got his first computer as a teenager in Ghana back in the ’80s, he was appalled to learn how it worked. “To do anything interesting was so complicated,” he says. “I figured there has to be a better way.” He doesn’t have a much higher opinion of today’s computer technology. While exponentially faster and more powerful than his first machine, even the latest supercomputers are woefully inefficient when compared to the one mechanism that really impresses him: the brain. Running on a mere 10 watts of power, the brain performs calculations that would require millions of Pentium processors and consume a gigawatt of power.

Rather than compete with biology, Boahen, a professor of bioengineering, seeks to emulate it on a chip. The physical realities are daunting: the brain is composed of a trillion neurons connected in a web so fine that a single cubic millimeter of cortex contains four kilometers of wiring. Moreover, the pattern in which the neurons are connected is constantly changing as we learn.

So Boahen has begun his research on a network similar in design and function to those of the brain proper, yet more self-contained and much simpler: the retina. Using transistors, he has built a circuit on a computer chip that measures light in the way that a real retina does. Instead of measuring lighting conditions at every point in its field of view, the retina compares light levels at many points and registers the contrasts. Greater efficiency means lower power consumption, resulting in a chip that can be used as a retinal prosthesis without overheating the eye.

Boahen is seeking to build a partial cortex on a circuit board within the next few years. He can imagine neurologists, soldering irons in hand, experimenting on this silicon brain with a directness that could never be attempted on a living organ. Insights from these experiments may allow surgeons decades from now to replace damaged areas of a real brain with silicon. [er, why do that, just learn to regrow it, it's already been found out that such nerves do grow back instead of simply stop.]

In the meantime, Boahen’s brain-inspired electronics are demonstrating ways in which computer design can be smarter, one day allowing handheld devices to become smaller and to run for longer on less power.

Mark said...

INVENTION 10
The invention machine

WHAT IT IS: Networked computers that crossbreed and mutate possible technological solutions until they invent something new

LEAD INVENTOR: Computer scientist John Koza, Stanford

SNAPSHOT: Using specially designed software and nearly a thousand Pentium computers, Koza’s machine mimics the process of natural selection. Only instead of evolving new plant or animal species over thousands of years, the machine can come up with innovations in a matter of days.

FANTASY APP: Combined with computer-aided manufacturing, an online invention machine will allow people to get customized electronics to suit virtually any personal need.

THE STORY: Koza was impressed with the creative track record of natural selection. His background in business (decades ago he co-invented the instant-win lottery ticket) makes him value efficiency, though, and for all practical purposes evolution can be unbearably slow. But what if humans could simulate and accelerate the process on a powerful computer? Koza, 63, and a rotating team of grad students have done that, developing software to perform evolution on demand.

If he wants to create a new type of electronic device, for instance, Koza begins by randomly generating a hundred thousand electric circuits from a catalog of standard components. While none of them will do exactly what he wants, some will come closer than others. Automatically measuring the degree to which the work of each circuit fits the specified criteria, the program eliminates the most blatant failures.

Then the software automatically crossbreeds some of the thousands of remaining circuits with other survivors, exchanging components in the way that children recombine the attributes of their parents. At the same time, the software randomly changes the survivors’ wiring ever so slightly and crossbreeds and mutates the second generation of circuits. The process repeats again and again until one of the circuits evolves, through a combination of sexual selection and chance, to meet the programmer’s requirements.

That takes hundreds of generations of circuits, of course. Koza uses a room full of PCs, nearly a thousand working together, and even with all those machines, the evolutionary process takes days or weeks. The results, though, can be startling. While he has yet to put anything on the market, he has applied for a patent on one of his automated inventions, a system for optimizing the output of manufactured goods. In early 2005, the application was accepted, meaning that the invention met the innovation standards of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

And genetic programming is already working for NASA, which recently launched a satellite with machine-invented antennae that look like mangled paperclips but outperform anything designed by human engineers.

Mark said...

Diatom- and sponge -inspired silicon manufacture:

Silicon chips are now processed in energy intensive, toxic ways.

Marine sponges, on the other hand, form silica dioxide structures at ambient conditions with the help of a protein called silicatein.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have created a mimic of this protein called a “cysteine-lysine block copolypeptide.”

Lab results confirm that these molecules are able to direct formation of ordered silica structures, just as silicatein does.

This demonstrates the possibility of developing a non-toxic, low temperature approach to computer chip manufacture.

Mark said...

Hardware, made of water:

Vol 3 No 5

Digital Biology and the Memory
Effect of Water


with Jacques Benveniste, M.D.
by Wynn Free

Will the eternal "Understand I do not, therefore it is not" prevail forever in science? Can we not say once and for all "bye-bye" to Galileo-style prosecution and replace it with genuine scientific debate?

Given my painful ten-year experience, we may as well start by throwing out the "pire-review" system which has become, behind its facade of excellence, the main antibody blocking the nearly deceased scientific free exchange which once was the cornerstone of scientific progress.
—Jacques Benveniste, M.D.


Dr. Jacques Benveniste is a medical doctor who has discovered certain scientific properties of water which defy explanation by the tenets of mainstream physics. His science, which he calls Digital Biology, is based upon two breakthrough observations that he can prove in experiments that have been duplicated by other scientists:

1. If a substance is diluted in water, the water can carry the memory of that substance even after it has been so diluted that none of the molecules of the original substance remain; and

2. The molecules of any given substance have a spectrum of frequencies that can be digitally recorded with a computer, then played back into untreated water (using an electronic transducer), and when this is done, the new water will act as if the actual substance were physically present.

The applications of Digital Biology are endless. Some of them include digital fertilizers and growth enhancers, detection of contaminating organisms in agriculture, digital pharmaceuticals, digital homeopathics, water analysis and purification, and electromagnetic pesticides.

Dr. Benveniste is a French medical doctor and researcher who studied at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, for three years. We spoke with him by phone at his research facility in Paris, France.

Wynn: Could you just briefly state what it is that you have discovered?

Jacques: It's known as the "memory of water." When you add a substance to water and then dilute the water to the point where there are no more molecules of the added substance left in the water, you can still measure effects of the water as if the originally diluted substance were still present.

Wynn: What made you curious enough to start your research?

Jacques: It was an accident. There was a technician in my lab who accidentally diluted more than she thought, and realized that for the amount of molecules that were left there shouldn't be any indication of the original substance. But there was.

We kept diluting, and the action kept coming back. So we knew we had a new phenomenon.

Wynn: That would it mean if I had a giant lake and I poured something into the lake...?

Jacques: No, it doesn't work that way.

First you have to add the substance to the water in a fixed proportion: one to ten, one to a hundred, one to a thousand... So it's a very small amount of information that you bring.

Wynn: Why do you think those specific proportions are meaningful?

Jacques: We don't know. But out of serendipity and experience, we have shown that without those proportions, it doesn't work as well.

Then, between each dilution, you have to agitate violently for 20 seconds to incorporate the little amount of information you put into the test tube.

So for instance you might put one drop of the diluting medium into nine-hundred-ninety-nine drops of water, then agitate for twenty seconds with a violent motion — in what we call a vortex.

Only then do you get the transmission of the information.

You wouldn't be able to shake your lake.

Wynn: A vortex is like a spiral?

Jacques: Exactly, like a funnel inside of the water.

Wynn: How do you determine that the water has the memory of the original substance?

Jacques: You get a specific effect.

Here's an example. Let's say that you apply a histamine to the skin of an animal and it creates an irritation, like a blister. Then if you apply water that has been given the memory of histamine to the skin of the same animal, you will also end up with a blister. That's what I mean by a specific effect.

We added histamine to an isolated guinea-pig heart and found that the effect was the same whether we used a high dilution or the original strength. We did the same with other compounds and got the same result.

We can take this one step further. We can record the activity in the water that has a diluted substance on a computer, and then play the recording to untreated water. And the computer-treated water will have the same effect as the water that was treated with an actual substance and diluted.

Wynn: Let me see if I understood what you just said. Instead of putting the substance in the water, you can put the frequencies of the substance in the water?

Jacques: We don't like to use the word "frequency," because that implies we know what the frequency is. In fact, it's exactly the same thing when you record something on your computer — a song or a voice — and then you replay it. Your ear is vibrating the same way as if the person were in the room. The ear is fooled by the recording. The ear reacts just as if the singer were singing live in the room. You don't know the frequencies involved, you just know that the voice coming out of the speaker exactly emulates how the singer would sound if they were live in the room.

In the same way, you can record the frequency spectrum of a substance.

Wynn: By what interface do you get the spectrum from the treated water into the untreated water?

Jacques: Instead of replaying to a loudspeaker, we use the loudspeaker outlet of the sound card, and plug in a copper coil. The frequency spectrums are always within the audio range of 20 to 20,000 cycles per second.

The point is that we have solved one of the mysteries of classical biology. The phrase "molecular signal" is one of the most used references in biology, except no one has known or asked, "What is the physical nature of the signal?" And we have discovered that at least a good representative signal of the molecule is between 20 and 20,000 Hertz, which makes sense, as only a low frequency can get through water.

Wynn: How do you record a signal from a substance?

Jacques: Think of a microphone without a membrane, just an electromagnetic coil. You plug that electronic coil into the female receptacle of the sound card. Then you put the molecules in a test tube next to the coil. When those millions of molecules in this liquid vibrate, it's enough for the coil to pick them up.

We are just using commercially available components to measure this.

Wynn: So these experiments sound as though they can be duplicated very easily.

Jacques: Actually, it takes very stringent conditions for the experiment to be repeatable. That's because when you replay to water, the water may or may not take the signal, depending upon local electromagnetic conditions.

For example, now you are recording my voice on tape, and if you put a magnet over the tape, you will erase my voice. But if we were talking face to face, you could put the magnet in front of my mouth and you would still hear my words. So there is a difference between the electromagnetic recording and the real voice, even though they both sound the same.

So the electromagnetic fields in the environment affect whether or not the signal is transferred back to the water.

A lab in Chicago duplicated my experiment where they recorded 26 samples, of which half, or 13, were a control group of random frequencies, and half were actual molecular signals of various substances. Then they sent the untitled computer .wav files to me — so my lab didn't know which was which. But we were able to recognize and identify the 13 real substances, as separate from the control, with a very high significance.

When I published this, no one believed it at first. They thought it was impossible to send molecules over the Atlantic. But they never could point to anything wrong with the experimental protocol.

Wynn: What is it in water that holds the memory?

Jacques: This is the multimillion-dollar question. People will have to rethink the ideas they have on water.

From the get-go, water doesn't behave as it should. There are more than 30 physical constants of water that are "wrong."

For example, water is a mixture of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, that become liquid at ordinary room temperature. That's totally impossible. Water shouldn't exist.

Why is water liquid? The physicists don't understand this. None of this can really be understood by the common laws of physics. So even though it's inexplicable, all I can do is to repeat my experiments and demonstrate that it works.

Wynn: What's the connection between your discoveries and homeopathy?

Jacques: That has actually become an area of controversy. I am not an alternative practitioner, but a very classical doctor. But I was accused of supporting homeopathy. Regular doctors get very upset when you do something that seems to validate homeopathy.

Yet my experiments do show irrefutably that even when you highly dilute a compound, you can still get activity. So in essence my experiments give a scientific explanation of how homeopathy can work.

It's like a CD. When you break open a CD, the singer is not inside. But you can get the same effect. You don't need the real thing.

Wynn: What are some of the other applications of your discovery?

Jacques: One application is that you can put a detector anywhere in the world and detect any bacteria that are around. You can go to the middle of nowhere in Africa, and if you have a telephone or satellite, in seconds you can send anywhere the signal of the bacteria which are in proximity to the detector. You can then identify the specific bacteria. We do it every day in the lab.

The old way of doing this is to manually collect samples of water and send it to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), where they will manually analyze the water for traces of bacteria.

Wynn: So if you were working with a very contagious bacterium, you could analyze it without being in direct exposure to it. But couldn't the signal of the bacteria make someone sick?

Jacques: I don't believe so, unless you would put this person inside of a huge coil and send thousands of watts with the signal of the bacteria through the coil. Then if the bacteria generated a toxin in the body, the toxin could be duplicated through the coil. But by diffusing the signal in the air, it would just be too weak.

Wynn: What are some other applications?

Jacques: We think we could detect the AIDS virus at concentrations way below what is commonly measurable. If someone is contaminated with AIDS, there is a period where the antibodies do not appear, yet the person is very contagious. This is a nightmare for blood banks. This could be done very cheaply as compared to DNA analysis.

So far, we are working on a very small budget, so we've haven't been able to develop these protocols yet.

Another application would be killing pests with the field. This would allow pests to be eliminated without contaminating the environment with toxic chemicals.

Wynn: How have you funded your experiments?

Jacques: I am not funded at all. I have created a company with my collaborator called Digi-Bio. We financed our company with small investors, but we are currently looking for larger sponsors so we can develop applications for this technology. There are many other possible applications yet to be discovered and proven.

Right now there are only three people working on this project. But someday I believe there will be thousands of researchers experimenting on this technology, and then the applications will develop fast. But perhaps that will be 30 years from now.

There's nothing described in physics that explains why, when you put two molecules in proximity to each other, there would be any kind of exchange of information except with radioactive substances. The only way that molecules could communicate is by their vibrations. It is known that molecules vibrate. This has been known for 50 years.

So what we are saying is that the vibration is not separate from the molecule. And these vibrations are the way molecules communicate. Digi-Bio is demonstrating the validity of this communication, and this is a significant breakthrough.

Wynn: Thank you very much for taking your time to explain this research to our readers.

Jacques: Thank you for giving me the opportunity.





NOTE: This is a bilingual pun: The French word pire, which is pronounced the same as the English word peer, means "worse."

Dr. Jacques BenvenisteJacques Benveniste is a Doctor of Medicine and a former resident of the Paris Hospital System and research director at the French National Institute for Medical Research. He is known worldwide as a specialist in the mechanisms of allergy and inflammation, and achieved recognition in 1971 by his discovery of Paf (Platelet Activating Factor), a mediator implicated in the mechanisms involved in allergy pathologies (for example, asthma).

In 1984, while working on hypersensitive (allergic) systems, by chance he brought to light the so-called "high dilution phenomenon," which was picked up by the media and labeled "the memory of water."

The DigiBio website contains a wealth of information about experimental protocols that support Dr. Benveniste's discoveries, the many applications to which this new technology might be put, and the beginnings of a theory to explain how molecules actually communicate. You can contact him by email at JBenveniste@DigiBio.com.

Mark said...

If this process could be made less toxic, it's more approvable for sustainability.


100,000-Year Memory Candidate
September 24th, 02007
by Kevin Kelly

DVDs don’t. Tape doesn’t. Paper won’t. But rock does.

In fact carved rock is about the only medium we have that might last 100,000 years. Most of our current electronic media will hardly last several decades. You need to continuously migrate info from one platform to the next as the current platform crumbles beneath you.

The first enthusiasms for a new electronic platform hint that perhaps “self-assembling nanowire of germanium antimony telluride” may have a working life of 100,000 years. According to this report in Physorg, this new nanoscale memory material is not only extremely small but also extremely durable.

(The original work was published in the October 2007 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which is not online yet.)

Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per bit).

They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.

“This new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data and even download entertainment as consumers,” Agarwal said. “This represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.”

Selfassemblenano
(This picture is of a different self-assembling nano circuit by IBM.)

We’ve heard that last claim before.

But even if this memory would remain intact for 1,000 years, it would be a revolution in digital preservation. [in our society increasingly made out of temporary beach sand patterns drawn in the digital dust...]

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http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/24/100000-year-memory-candidate/

Mark said...

Computers are a very polluting industry.

I'm sure that this bodes it can be an infectious industry as well: E.Coli computers.

However the principle could be employed in something less toxic to human beings.

Genetically-Altered E Coli For Computer Data Storage? Move over toxic silicon mining and industrial uses...

New Meaning For The Term 'Computer Bug': Genetically Altered Bacteria For Data Storage

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2008) — US researchers have created 'living computers' by genetically altering bacteria. The findings of the research demonstrate that computing in living cells is feasible, opening the door to a number of applications including data storage and as a tool for manipulating genes for genetic engineering.

A research team from the biology and the mathematics departments of Davidson College, North Carolina and Missouri Western State University, Missouri, USA added genes to Escherichia coli bacteria, creating bacterial computers able to solve a classic mathematical puzzle, known as the burnt pancake problem.

The burnt pancake problem involves a stack of pancakes of different sizes, each of which has a golden and a burnt side. The aim is to sort the stack so the largest pancake is on the bottom and all pancakes are golden side up. Each flip reverses the order and the orientation (i.e. which side of the pancake is facing up) of one or several consecutive pancakes. The aim is to stack them properly in the fewest number of flips.

In this experiment, the researchers used fragments of DNA as the pancakes. They added genes from a different type of bacterium to enable the E. coli to flip the DNA 'pancakes'. They also included a gene that made the bacteria resistant to an antibiotic, but only when the DNA fragments had been flipped into the correct order. The time required to reach the mathematical solution in the bugs reflects the minimum number of flips needed to solve the burnt pancake problem.

"The system offers several potential advantages over conventional computers" says lead researcher, Karmella Haynes. "A single flask can hold billions of bacteria, each of which could potentially contain several copies of the DNA used for computing. These 'bacterial computers' could act in parallel with each other, meaning that solutions could potentially be reached quicker than with conventional computers, using less space and at a lower cost."

In addition to parallelism, bacterial computing also has the potential to utilize repair mechanisms and, of course, can evolve after repeated use.

Note: The researchers utilized "BioBricks" which are documented and distributed by the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts (partsregistry.org) as a component of the iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine) competition (http://www.igem.org).

Journal reference:

1. Engineering bacteria to solve the Burnt Pancake Problem. Karmella A Haynes, Marian L Broderick, Adam D Brown, Trevor L Butner, James O Dickson, W L Harden, Lane H Heard, Eric L Jessen, Kelly J Malloy, Brad J Ogden, Sabriya Rosemond, Samantha Simpson, Erin Zwack, A M Campbell, Todd T Eckdahl, Laurie J Heyer and Jeffrey L Poet. Journal of Biological Engineering (in press)

Adapted from materials provided by BioMed Central/Journal of Biological Engineering, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080520090551.htm

Mark said...

New 'Quasiparticles' Discovered; May Pave Way Toward New Quantum Computer

ScienceDaily (Jun. 5, 2008) — Weizmann Institute physicists have demonstrated, for the first time, the existence of 'quasiparticles' with one quarter the charge of an electron. This finding could be a first step toward creating exotic types of quantum computers that might be powerful, yet highly stable.

Fractional electron charges were first predicted over 20 years ago under conditions existing in the so-called quantum Hall effect, and were found by the Weizmann group some ten years ago. Although electrons are indivisible, if they are confined to a two-dimensional layer inside a semiconductor, chilled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and exposed to a strong magnetic field that is perpendicular to the layer, they effectively behave as independent particles, called quasiparticles, with charges smaller than that of an electron. But until now, these charges had always been fractions with odd denominators: one third of an electron, one fifth, etc.

The experiment done by research student Merav Dolev in Prof. Moty Heiblum’s group, in collaboration with Drs. Vladimir Umansky and Diana Mahalu, and Prof. Ady Stern, all of the Condensed Matter Physics Department, owes the finding of quarter-charge quasiparticles to an extremely precise setup and unique material properties: The gallium arsenide material they produced for the semiconductor was some of the purest in the world.

The scientists tuned the electron density in the two-dimensional layer – in which about three billion electrons were confined in the space of a square millimeter – such that there were five electrons for every two magnetic field fluxes. The device they created is shaped like a flattened hourglass, with a narrow 'waist' in the middle that allows only a small number of charge-carrying particles to pass through at a time. The 'shot noise' produced when some passed through and others bounced back caused fluctuations in the current that are proportional to the passing charges, thus allowing the scientists to accurately measure the quasiparticles’ charge.

Quarter-charge quasiparticles should act quite differently from odd fractionally charged particles, and this is why they have been sought as the basis of the theoretical 'topographical quantum computer.' When particles such as electrons, photons, or even those with odd fractional charges change places with one another, there is little overall effect. In contrast, quarter-charge particle exchanges might weave a 'braid' that preserves information on the particles’ history. To be useful for topologically-based quantum computers, the quarter-charge particles must be shown to have 'non-Abelian' properties – that is the order of the braiding must be significant. These subtle properties are extremely difficult to observe. Heiblum and his team are now working on devising experimental setups to test for these properties.

Prof. Moty Heiblum’s research is supported by the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research. Prof. Heiblum is the incumbent of the Alex and Ida Sussman Professorial Chair in Submicron Electronics.

Journal reference:

1. Dolev et al. Observation of a quarter of an electron charge at the nu = 5/2 quantum Hall state. Nature, 2008; 452 (7189): 829 DOI: 10.1038/nature06855

Adapted from materials provided by Weizmann Institute of Science.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080602103355.htm

Mark said...

Electron Spin Rotated With Electric Field

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — Researchers at the Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) have succeeded in controlling the spin of a single electron merely by using electric fields.

This clears the way for a much simpler realization of the building blocks of a (future) super-fast quantum computer.

Controlling the spin of a single electron is essential if this spin is to be used as the building block of a future quantum computer. An electron not only has a charge but, because of its spin, also behaves as a tiny magnet. In a magnetic field, the spin can point in the same direction as the field or in the opposite direction, but the laws of quantum mechanics also allow the spin to exist in both states simultaneously.

As a result, the spin of an electron is a very promising building block for the yet-to-be-developed quantum computer; a computer that, for certain applications, is far more powerful than a conventional computer.

At first glance it is surprising that the spin can be rotated by an electric field. However, we know from the Theory of Relativity that a moving electron can 'feel' an electric field as though it were a magnetic field. Researchers Katja Nowack and Dr. Frank Koppens therefore forced an electron to move through a rapidly-changing electric field. Working in collaboration with Prof. Yuli V. Nazarov, theoretical researcher at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, they showed that it was indeed possible to turn the spin of the electron by doing so.

The advantage of controlling spin with electric fields rather than magnetic fields is that the former are easy to generate. It will also be easier to control various spins independently from one another - a requirement for building a quantum computer - using electric fields. The team, led by Dr. Lieven Vandersypen, is now going to apply this technique to a number of electrons.

The scientists published their work in Science Express on 1 November, 2007.

Adapted from materials provided by Delft University of Technology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071101144942.htm

Mark said...

Optical Technique For Controlling Electron Spins In Quantum Dot Ensembles Developed

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2007) — Scientists are closer to developing novel devices for optics-based quantum computing and quantum information processing, as a result of a breakthrough in understanding how to make all the spins in an ensemble of quantum dots identical.

This understanding, based upon a new optical technique and announced recently by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the University of Dortmund, and the University of Bochum, is an important step toward realization of such quantum devices based on solid-state technology.

An electron spin localized in a quantum dot is the quantum bit, which is the basic unit for solid-state based quantum computing and quantum information processing. The spin replaces a classical digital bit, which can take on two values, usually labeled 0 and 1. The electron spin can also take on two values. However, since it is a quantum object, it can also take all values in between.

Obviously, such a quantum unit can hold much more information than a classical one and, even more importantly the use of such quantum bits makes certain computer calculations exponentially more efficient than those using a standard computer. That is why, scientists around the world are trying to find an efficient way to control and manipulate the electron spin in a quantum dot in order to enable new quantum devises using magnetic and electric fields.

Until now, the major problem with using charged quantum dots in such devices is that the electron spins in different quantum dots are never identical. The electron spin precession frequencies in an external magnetic field are different from each other due to small variations of the quantum dot shape and size. In addition, the electron spin precession frequency has a contribution of a random hyperfine field of the nuclear spins in the quantum dot volume. This makes a coherent control and manipulation of electron spins in an ensemble of quantum dots impossible and pushes researchers to work with individual spins and to develop single spin manipulation techniques, which are much more complicated than an ensemble manipulation technique.

The team of researchers at the University of Dortmund, NRL and the University of Bochum has taken a significant step toward solving this problem by suggesting a new technique that would allow coherent manipulations of an ensemble of electron spins. Last year in a Science publication (Science, vol. 313, 341 (2006)), the same research team demonstrated a method, whereby a tailored periodic illumination with a pulsed laser can drive a large fraction of electron spins (up to 30%) in an ensemble of quantum dots into a synchronized motion.

In the new Science publication, the team shows that almost the whole ensemble of electron spins (90%) precesses coherently under periodic resonant excitation. It turns out that the nuclear contribution to the electron spin precession acts constructively by focusing the electron spin precession in different quantum dots to a few precession modes controlled by the laser excitation protocol, instead of acting as a random perturbation of electron spins, as it was thought previously. The modification of the laser protocol should allow scientists to reach a situation in which all electron spins have the same precession frequency, in other words to make all spins identical.

Future efforts involving the use of these identical electron spins will focus on demonstrating all coherent single q-bit operations using an ensemble of charged quantum dots. Another important use of such ensembles for quantum computing will be the demonstration of a quantum-dot gate operation. The macroscopic coherent precession of the electron spin ensemble will allow scientists to study several optical coherent phenomena, such as electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light, for example.

The complete findings of the study are published in the September 28, 2007, issue of the journal Science.

The research was conducted by Dr. Alex Greilich, Prof. Dmitri R. Yakovlev, Dr. Irina A. Yugova and Prof Manfred Bayer from the Institute Experimental Physics II of the University of Dortmund, Germany; Dr. Andrew Shabaev and Dr. Alexander L. Efros from NRL; and Dr. D. Reuter, and Prof. A. D. Wieck from the Physics Institute of the University of Bochum, Germany.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071115164316.htm

Mark said...

Potential Tool For Selectively Manipulating Electron Spins In New Technologies Arises Unexpectedly

ScienceDaily (Jun. 1, 2008) — University of Oregon researchers trying to flip the spin of electrons with laser bursts lasting picoseconds (a trillionth of a second) instead found a way to manipulate and control the spin -- knowledge that may prove useful in a variety of new materials and technologies.

Physicists in recent years have been pursuing a variety of routes to tap electron spins for their potential use in quantum computers that can perform millions of computations at a time and store immense quantities of data or for use in emerging optic devices or spintronics.

"Spin is another dimension of electrons," said Hailin Wang, a professor of physics at the UO. "The electronics industry has depended on electron charges for more than 50 years. To make major improvements, we now need to go beyond charges to spin, which has been very important in physics but not used very often in applications."

Wang and his doctoral student Shannon O'Leary theorized that they could flip an electron's spin up to down, or vice versa, by using a nonlinear optical technique called transient differential transmission. They describe their "failure" to flip the spin and their unexpected discovery in Physical Review B, a journal devoted to condensed matter and materials physics.

The overall goal, Wang and O'Leary said, is to be able to force the spin to flip using light. Their studies involved the use of nonlinear optical processes of electron spin coherence in a modulation-doped CdTe quantum well -- semiconductor material formed from cadmium and tellurium, sandwiched in a crystalline compound between two other semiconductor barrier layers. A doped quantum well contains extra embedded electrons in a near two-dimensional state.

O'Leary initialized a spin in an experiment using a "gyro-like" arrangement with a short pulse of laser. At specific times, she hit the spin with another laser pulse with the absorption energy of an exciton (an electron-hole pair) or trion (a charged exciton). Hitting the spin with a third pulse allows them to study what impact the second pulse had on the spin.

"We know that in this particular system, excitons quickly convert into trions by binding to a free electron," O'Leary said. "One surprising aspect is that injecting trions directly does not manipulate the spin. So the manipulation effect has to do with the conversion of the excitons to trions."

The behaviors they discovered were unexpected but intriguing, Wang said. "We were not able to flip the spin, but what we found is something quite puzzling, quite unexpected, that was not supposed to happen. We now want to understand why the system works this way. This will require some more work. We wanted to get from point A to B, but we went to C."

The detour, however, "shows that we can manipulate the spin when we inject excitons at appropriate times in the precession cycle of the spin," O'Leary said. "The result gives scientists a new tool for manipulating spins, and it may prove to be a handy method because it simply requires shining a pulse of light of the appropriate energy at the right time."

The National Science Foundation and Army Research Office funded the research.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Oregon.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080528095901.htm

Mark said...

"Quantum Dots" Could Form Basis Of New Computers

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2001) — WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Scientists at Purdue University are helping researchers take a quantum leap in computer technology.

They have linked two tiny structures — quantum dots — in such a way that is essential for the creation of semiconductor-based quantum computers, which could be faster and provide more memory than conventional technology.

The findings will be detailed in the Friday (9/21) issue of the journal Science, in a research paper written by Albert M. Chang, a professor of physics at Purdue, doctoral physics student Heejun Jeong and Michael R. Melloch, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Today's computers work by representing information as a series of ones and zeros, or binary digits called "bits." This code is relayed by transistors, which are minute switches that can either be on or off, representing a one or a zero, respectively.

Quantum computers would take advantage of a strange phenomenon described by quantum theory: Objects, such as atoms or electrons, can be in two places at the same time, or they can exist in two states at the same time. That means computers based on quantum physics would have quantum bits, or "qubits," that exist in both the on and off states simultaneously, making it possible for them to process information much faster than conventional computers.

A string of quantum bits would be able to calculate every possible on-off combination simultaneously, dramatically increasing the computer's power and memory.

The switches in a quantum computer would be made of puddles of about 20 electrons called quantum dots, which are formed inside of computer circuitry. Each quantum dot, like each transistor in a conventional computer, is like a switch that defines a single qubit.

The quantum dots themselves are only about 180 nanometers in diameter — about 5,000 of them could stretch across the width of a grain of sand.

For quantum computations to work, information will have to be exchanged between pairs of qubits.

Because electrons are said to have a "spin" of either up or down, the direction of spin can be used instead of the on or off positions of a conventional computer circuit.

"Each dot can have a one or a zero, because the spin can be up or down," Chang said.

The Purdue researchers have been able to link two quantum dots, control how many electrons are in each dot and then detect the spin state in each dot.

They are the first scientists to be able to detect the individual spins of each of the two quantum dots linked together, information essential for quantum computing.

Unlike conventional computer circuitry in which electrical current is used to carry information and perform computations, quantum-dot based quantum computers would rely on the manipulation of the electron spin.

"Without being able to isolate each spin, you cannot do quantum computation," Chang said.

In nature, the electrons in an atom occupy a series of levels that increase in energy with distance from the atom's nucleus. In a similar way, the Purdue researchers are able to control how many electrons occupy a quantum dot's outermost level.

When quantum dots contain only one electron in their outermost level, their spins can be detected by analyzing the flow of electricity through the dots, Chang said.

The researchers were able to achieve the milestone by creating extremely fine circuits using a standard process known as electron beam lithography. A semiconducting material known as gallium arsenide was coated with a plastic. Then extremely fine lines were cut into the plastic coating using a beam of electrons. The lines were filled with a metal and the plastic dissolved, leaving behind metal lines that are like wires only about 50 nanometers wide. A nanometer — or billionth of a meter — is roughly five to 10 atoms wide.

"As far as we know, no other groups have been able to do such fine lithography," Chang said.

Other researchers have already built quantum computing devices based on man-made molecules containing fluorine atoms. However, many experts believe it will be difficult to "scale up" such devices to make large, workable computers.

"Whereas, the advantage of semiconductors is that, once you've proven the feasibility, you've got the whole semiconductor industry's expertise behind you," Chang noted.

Continuing research will aim to not only detect the spins on each quantum dot, but to precisely control the spins, which is necessary for future computer applications.

"Now we have proven that you can link quantum dots together, but the next thing will be to make them do things, to control the spins in a double-quantum dot," Chang said.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/09/010925071906.htm

Mark said...

Researchers Light Up 'Dark' Spins In Diamond; Discovery Could Lead To Room Temperature Quantum Computing

ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2005) — Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have potentially opened up a new avenue toward room temperature quantum information processing. By demonstrating the ability to image and control single isolated electron spins in diamond, they unexpectedly discovered a new channel for transferring information to other surrounding spins -- an initial step towards spin-based information processing.

Quantum information processing uses the remarkable aspects of quantum mechanics as the basis for a new generation of computing and secure communication. The spin of a particle is quantum mechanical in nature, and is considered a viable candidate to implement such technologies.

A team of researchers including graduate students Ryan Epstein and Felix Mendoza, and their advisor, David Awschalom, a professor of physics, were intrigued by the long-lived electronic spins of so-called nitrogen-vacancy impurities in the diamond crystal -- defects that only consist of two atomic sites. So, about two years ago, they embarked on developing a sensitive room temperature microscope that would allow them to study individual defects through their light emission.

This microscope, with its unique precision in the control of the magnetic field alignment, has allowed them to not only detect individual nitrogen-vacancy defects, but also small numbers of previously invisible 'dark' spins from nitrogen defects in their vicinity. These spins are called 'dark' because they cannot be directly detected by light emission and yet, it appears that they may prove extremely useful.

"We have found a channel for moving information between single electron spins at room temperature," said Awschalom. "This bodes well for making networks of spins, using the dark spins as wires, in order to process information at the atomic level."

The paper, "Anisotropic interactions of a single spin and dark-spin spectroscopy in diamond," is being published by Nature Physics in November 2005, and is available through advance online publication at: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/index.html.

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Barbara.


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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051031080640.htm

Mark said...

The Spin On Spintronics

ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2006) — That new personal computer is small and super fast, boasts gigabytes of memory, boots up instantly, offers a standby mode that consumes no electric power, and yet keeps programs and data instantly available in active memory. Well, maybe not quite yet.

But, a rapidly emerging field called spintronics may make such revolutionary new electronic devices a reality, according to a report scheduled for the Aug. 28 issue of the ACS's weekly newsmagazine, Chemical & Engineering News.

Senior Editor Mitch Jacoby explains that despite 50 years of progress in developing tiny semiconductor chips packed with millions of transistors, today's circuit elements operate on the same principle as 1940s-vintage transistors. They sense and respond to an electron's charge only.

Spintronics (spin-based electronics) uses an electron's angular momentum, a property associated with magnetism and classified as "spin up" or "spin down." Jacoby describes the innovations that spintronics promises, from the near-term to that futuristic quantum computer, which would encode data as multiple quantum states in addition to the "1s" and "0s" of traditional binary computing.

Fulfilling the promise of advanced electronic devices with unprecedented capabilities will require overcoming major technical challenges, including synthesizing new magnetic semiconductors and other materials with properties suited for spintronics applications, the article notes.

Reference: "Putting a spin on electronics: Potential for advanced technologies is driving search for magnetic semiconductors."

Chemical & Engineering News
Adapted from materials provided by American Chemical Society.


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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060829081620.htm

Mark said...

Optical Technique For Controlling Electron Spins In Quantum Dot Ensembles Developed

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2007) — Scientists are closer to developing novel devices for optics-based quantum computing and quantum information processing, as a result of a breakthrough in understanding how to make all the spins in an ensemble of quantum dots identical.

This understanding, based upon a new optical technique and announced recently by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the University of Dortmund, and the University of Bochum, is an important step toward realization of such quantum devices based on solid-state technology.

An electron spin localized in a quantum dot is the quantum bit, which is the basic unit for solid-state based quantum computing and quantum information processing. The spin replaces a classical digital bit, which can take on two values, usually labeled 0 and 1. The electron spin can also take on two values. However, since it is a quantum object, it can also take all values in between.

Obviously, such a quantum unit can hold much more information than a classical one and, even more importantly the use of such quantum bits makes certain computer calculations exponentially more efficient than those using a standard computer. That is why, scientists around the world are trying to find an efficient way to control and manipulate the electron spin in a quantum dot in order to enable new quantum devises using magnetic and electric fields.

Until now, the major problem with using charged quantum dots in such devices is that the electron spins in different quantum dots are never identical. The electron spin precession frequencies in an external magnetic field are different from each other due to small variations of the quantum dot shape and size. In addition, the electron spin precession frequency has a contribution of a random hyperfine field of the nuclear spins in the quantum dot volume. This makes a coherent control and manipulation of electron spins in an ensemble of quantum dots impossible and pushes researchers to work with individual spins and to develop single spin manipulation techniques, which are much more complicated than an ensemble manipulation technique.

The team of researchers at the University of Dortmund, NRL and the University of Bochum has taken a significant step toward solving this problem by suggesting a new technique that would allow coherent manipulations of an ensemble of electron spins. Last year in a Science publication (Science, vol. 313, 341 (2006)), the same research team demonstrated a method, whereby a tailored periodic illumination with a pulsed laser can drive a large fraction of electron spins (up to 30%) in an ensemble of quantum dots into a synchronized motion.

In the new Science publication, the team shows that almost the whole ensemble of electron spins (90%) precesses coherently under periodic resonant excitation. It turns out that the nuclear contribution to the electron spin precession acts constructively by focusing the electron spin precession in different quantum dots to a few precession modes controlled by the laser excitation protocol, instead of acting as a random perturbation of electron spins, as it was thought previously. The modification of the laser protocol should allow scientists to reach a situation in which all electron spins have the same precession frequency, in other words to make all spins identical.

Future efforts involving the use of these identical electron spins will focus on demonstrating all coherent single q-bit operations using an ensemble of charged quantum dots. Another important use of such ensembles for quantum computing will be the demonstration of a quantum-dot gate operation. The macroscopic coherent precession of the electron spin ensemble will allow scientists to study several optical coherent phenomena, such as electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light, for example.

The complete findings of the study are published in the September 28, 2007, issue of the journal Science.

The research was conducted by Dr. Alex Greilich, Prof. Dmitri R. Yakovlev, Dr. Irina A. Yugova and Prof Manfred Bayer from the Institute Experimental Physics II of the University of Dortmund, Germany; Dr. Andrew Shabaev and Dr. Alexander L. Efros from NRL; and Dr. D. Reuter, and Prof. A. D. Wieck from the Physics Institute of the University of Bochum, Germany.

Adapted from materials provided by Naval Research Laboratory, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071115164316.htm

Mark said...

Two Qubits In Action, New Step Towards The Quantum Computer

ScienceDaily (Jun. 17, 2007) — Researchers at Delft University of Technology have succeeded in carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer. The Delft researchers are publishing an article about this important step towards a workable quantum computer in this week's issue of Nature.

Quantum computers have superior qualities in comparison to the type of computers currently in use. If they are realised, then quantum computers will be able to carry out tasks that are beyond the abilities of all normal computers.

A quantum computer is based on the amazing properties of quantum systems. In these a quantum bit, also known as a qubit, exists in two states at the same time and the information from two qubits is entangled in a way that has no equivalent whatsoever in the normal world.

It is highly likely that workable quantum computers will need to be produced using existing manufacturing techniques from the chip industry. Working on this basis, scientists at Delft University of Technology are currently studying two types of qubits: one type makes use of tiny superconducting rings, and the other makes use of 'quantum dots'.

Now for the first time a 'controlled-NOT' calculation with two qubits has been realised with the superconducting rings. This is important because it allows any given quantum calculation to be realised.

The result was achieved by the PhD student Jelle Plantenberg in the team led by Kees Harmans and Hans Mooij. The research took place within the FOM (Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) concentration group for Solid State Quantum Information Processing.
Adapted from materials provided by Delft University of Technology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070614104042.htm

Mark said...

Paper Discusses Circuitry For Quantum Computing

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2002) — ANN ARBOR -- The next radically different means of information processing will be quantum computing, which researchers say will use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations in a fraction of the time needed by the world’s fastest supercomputers.

A paper published recently in Physical Review Letters (Nov. 4 issue) has proposed an experimentally realizable circuit and an efficient scheme to implement scalable quantum computing. The ability to scale up the technology from the one or two-qubit experiments that are common in the laboratory to systems involving many qubits is what will finally make it possible to actually build a quantum computer.

“Scalable quantum computing with Josephson charge qubits,” was written by Franco Nori of the University of Michigan Physics Department and the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) and two colleagues, J.Q. You from the institute and J.S. Tsai from the institute and the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories.

Quantum computing is very different from the standard computers used today. Today’s computers process information using bits, each one equal to either 0 or 1. Quantum information processing uses quantum versions of these bits, individual atoms or subatomic particles called qubits. These qubits can be equal to 0, to1, or even both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability to manipulate these superpositions of 0 and 1 is what will allow quantum computers to process complex information so quickly, since any given qubit can occupy either position.

In order to implement quantum information technology, it will be necessary to prepare, manipulate and measure the fragile quantum state of a system. "The first steps in this field have mostly focused on the study of single qubits,” Nori said. “But constructing a large quantum computer will mean scaling up to very many qubits, and controlling the connectivity between them. These are two of the major stumbling blocks to achieving practical quantum computing and we believe our method can efficiently solve these two central problems. In addition, a series of operations are proposed for achieving efficient quantum computations.

“We have proposed a way to solve a central problem in quantum computing – how to select two qubits, among very many, and make them interact with each other, even though they might not be nearest neighbors, as well as how to perform efficient quantum computing operations with them,” Nori said.

A copy of the paper (no. 197902) can be found at http://ojps.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PRLTAO&Volume=89&Issue=19

Adapted from materials provided by University Of Michigan.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/10/021024070245.htm

Mark said...

Physicists 'Entangle' Light, Pave Way To Atomic-scale Measurements

ScienceDaily (May 13, 2004) — University of Toronto physicists have developed a way to entangle photons which could ultimately lead to an extremely precise new measurement system.

Their study appears in the May 13 issue of the journal Nature. The findings could ultimately prove useful in developing ways to measure gravitational waves or the energy structure of atoms, and could also help in the development of "quantum computers." (Quantum computers work according to the principles of quantum mechanics, which describes atoms, photons, and other microscopic objects.)

Previous studies have theorized that quantum computers using entangled photons could perform calculations far more quickly than current computers. "We know that today's computers are approaching limits of size and speed," says lead author and post-doctoral fellow Morgan Mitchell. "Quantum computing offers a possible way to move beyond that. Our research borrows some tricks from quantum computing and applies them to precision measurement."

Mitchell, working with Professor Aephraim Steinberg and graduate student Jeff Lundeen, first prepared three photons each with a different state of polarization. The researchers directed one photon along a main pathway or "beam," then added a second photon. If researchers determined that both photons continued down the main beam, they concluded the two had become entangled. A third photon, with yet another polarization, was then added.

The team was able to create a three-photon state in 58 per cent of their attempts. "Nobody has taken three distinct photons and made a three-photon entangled state before," he says. The entire process occurred within nanoseconds over a physical span of less than a metre.

The researchers then demonstrated the use of the three-photon entangled state to make extremely precise measurements. To do so, they used an experiment based on a paradox associated with quantum mechanics, which suggests that a particle can be in two places at once.

By observing the movement of the photons past a series of mirrors and filters, the team was able to determine how far the photons had traveled.

Because the team used photons in a three-photon state, the system could provide measurements that were three times as precise as those made by a single photon. Since the new system, in theory, could incorporate an even larger number of photons, it could someday lead to a measurement system with significantly greater accuracy than anything that currently exists. The next step could be a practical test involving a measurement, says Mitchell.

The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Photonics Research Ontario, the Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations and the DARPA-QuIST program.
Adapted from materials provided by University Of Toronto.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040513010953.htm

Mark said...

NIST Demonstrates 'Teleportation' Of Atomic States For Quantum Computing

ScienceDaily (Jun. 21, 2004) — Physicists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated "teleportation" by transferring key properties of one atom to another atom without using any physical link, according to results reported in the June 17, 2004, issue of the journal Nature.

Unlike the "beaming" of actual physical objects and people between distant locations popularized in the Star Trek science fiction series, the term "teleportation" is how physicists describe a transfer of "quantum states" between separate atoms. The quantum state of an atom is a description of such things as its energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties.

The NIST experiments used laser beam manipulations to transfer quantum states of one beryllium atom to another atom within a set of microscale traps, with a 78 percent success rate. The technique may prove useful for transporting information in quantum computers of the future, which could use central processing elements smaller than a cube of sugar to carry out massively complex computations that are currently impossible.

If they can be built, quantum computers--harnessing the strange behavior of particles at the atomic scale--someday might be used for applications such as code breaking of unprecedented power, optimizing complex systems such as airline schedules, much faster database searching and solving of complex mathematical problems, and even the development of novel products such as fraud-proof digital signatures. The NIST work and other research by the University of Innsbruck reported in the same issue of Nature mark the first demonstrations of teleportation using atoms. Systems using atoms are arguably the leading candidate for storing and processing data in quantum computers. Teleportation could increase computing speed and efficiency by linking distant zones within a computer so that data could be processed by physically separated quantum bits (or qubits, the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0).

Quantum computing with atomic qubits requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states of the atoms. "It's hard to quickly move qubits to share or process information. But using teleportation as we've reported could allow logic operations to be performed much more quickly," says NIST physicist David Wineland, leader of the NIST work.

The NIST group previously has demonstrated the building blocks for a quantum computer based on atomic-ion traps. The new experiments, which are computer controlled and perform teleportation in about 4 milliseconds, incorporate most of the features required for large-scale information processing systems using ion traps. In addition, the experiments are relatively simple in design and could be used as part of a series of logical operations needed for practical computing.

The demonstration described in the Nature paper exploited quantum properties that are radically different from the properties observed in the "normal" world. For example, ions can be manipulated into a special state known as a "superposition" in which they literally can be in two places at once. Similarly, they also can hold information representing more than one number at once, a common property of all qubits. Ions also can be "entangled" with each other, so that their behavior is related in predictable ways, as if they were connected by an invisible force. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance."

The NIST experiments entangled a set of three ions, then destroyed the quantum state in one ion and teleported it to another one. The properties that were teleported included the "spin state" of the ion (up, down or a superposition of the two), and the "phase" (which has to do with the relative positions of the peaks and troughs of an ion's wave properties). A clever approach was required because of another unusual feature of the quantum world: measurements always alter quantum states (for example, causing superpositions to collapse). Therefore, the experiment teleported the quantum state without measuring it.

The ions were teleported inside a NIST-developed multi-zone trap, first described in 2002. Lasers are used to manipulate the ion's spin and motion, and to entangle the ions by linking their internal spin states to their external motion. A key technical advance reported in the current paper is the capability to entangle ions and then separate them in the trap (maintaining entanglement) without generating much heat. This previously led to uncontrolled motions that interfered with operations and required additional cooling operations. The advance was enabled in part by the use of smaller electrodes to generate electric fields that move the ions between trap zones.

The research was supported in part by the Advanced Research and Development Activity and the National Security Agency.

More information about NIST research on quantum computing can be found at http://qubit.nist.gov.

A non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST develops and promotes measurement, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade and improve the quality of life.

Teleportation takes place inside an ion trap made of gold electrodes deposited onto alumina. The trap area is the horizontal opening near the center of the image.
Adapted from materials provided by National Institute Of Standards And Technology.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040621075032.htm

Mark said...

Austrian Scientists Experimentally Demonstrate "Quantum Teleportation"

ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 1997) — Quantum teleportation has been experimentally demonstrated by physicists at the University of Innsbruck. First proposed in 1993 by Charles Bennett of IBM and his colleagues, quantum teleportation allows physicists to take a photon (or any other quantum-scale particle, such as an atom), and transfer its properties (such as its polarization) to another photon -- even if the two photons are on opposite sides of the galaxy.

Note that this scheme transports the particle's properties to the remote location and not the particle itself. And as with Star Trek's Captain Kirk, whose body is destroyed at the teleporter and reconstructed at his destination, the state of the original photon must be destroyed to create an exact reconstruction at the other end.

In the Innsbruck experiment, the researchers create a pair of photons A and B that are quantum mechanically "entangled": the polarization of each photon is in a fuzzy, undetermined state, yet the two photons have a precisely defined interrelationship. If one photon is later measured to have, say, a horizontal polarization, then the other photon must "collapse" into the complementary state of vertical polarization.

In the experiment, one of the entangled photons A arrives at an optical device at the exact time as a "message" photon M whose polarization state is to be teleported. These two photons enter a device where they become indistinguishable, thus effacing our knowledge of M's polarization (the equivalent of destroying Kirk).

What the researchers have verified is that by ensuring that M's polarization is complementary to A's, then B's polarization would now have to assume the same value as M's. In other words, although M and B have never been in contact, B has been imprinted with M's polarization value, across the whole galaxy, instantaneously.

This does not mean that faster-than-light information transfer has occurred.

The people at the sending station must still convey the fact that teleportation had been successful by making a phone call or using some other light-speed or sub-light-speed means of communication. While physicists don't foresee the possibility of teleporting large-scale objects like humans, this scheme will have uses in quantum computing and cryptography.

Adapted from materials provided by American Institute Of Physics.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/12/971215062803.htm

Mark said...

Quantum Computing Breakthrough Arises From Unknown Molecule

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2008) — The odd behavior of a molecule in an experimental silicon computer chip has led to a discovery that opens the door to quantum computing in semiconductors.

See also:
Matter & Energy

* Quantum Physics
* Physics
* Quantum Computing

Computers & Math

* Quantum Computers
* Computer Science
* Hacking

Reference

* Mechanics
* Quantum number
* Quantum computer
* Computing

In a Nature Physics journal paper currently online, the researchers describe how they have created a new, hybrid molecule in which its quantum state can be intentionally manipulated - a required step in the building of quantum computers.

"Up to now large-scale quantum computing has been a dream," says Gerhard Klimeck, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and associate director for technology for the national Network for Computational Nanotechnology.

"This development may not bring us a quantum computer 10 years faster, but our dreams about these machines are now more realistic."

The workings of traditional computers haven't changed since they were room-sized behemoths 50 years ago; they still use bits of information, 1s and 0s, to store and process information.

Quantum computers would harness the strange behaviors found in quantum physics to create computers that would carry information using quantum bits, or qubits.

Computers would be able to process exponentially more information.

If a traditional computer were given the task of looking up a person's phone number in a telephone book, it would look at each name in order until it found the right number. Computers can do this much faster than people, but it is still a sequential task. A quantum computer, however, could look at all of the names in the telephone book simultaneously.

Quantum computers also could take advantage of the bizarre behaviors of quantum mechanics - some of which are counterintuitive even to physicists - in ways that are hard to fathom.

For example, two quantum computers could, in concept, communicate instantaneously across any distance imaginable, even across solar systems.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to Erwin Schrödinger in the 1930s, wrote that in a quantum state a keg of gunpowder would have both exploded and unexploded molecules within it (a notion that led Schrödinger to create his famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment).

This "neither here nor there" quantum state is what can be controlled in this new molecule simply by altering the voltage of the transistor.

Until now, the challenge had been to create a computer semiconductor in which the quantum state could be controlled, creating a qubit.

"If you want to build a quantum computer you have to be able to control the occupancy of the quantum states," Klimeck says. "We can control the location of the electron in this artificial atom and, therefore, control the quantum state with an externally applied electrical field."


The discovery began when Sven Rogge and his colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were experimenting with nano-scale transistors that show the effects of unintentional impurities, or dopants.

The researchers found properties in the current-voltage characteristics of the transistor that indicated electrons were being transported by a single atom, but it was unclear what impurity was causing this effect.

Physicist Lloyd Hollenberg and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia were able to construct a theoretical silicon-based quantum computer chip based on the concept of using an individual impurity.

"The team found that the measurements only made sense if the molecule was considered to be made of two parts," Hollenberg says. "One end comprised the arsenic atom embedded in the silicon, while the 'artificial' end of the molecule forms near the silicon surface of the transistor. A single electron was spread across both ends.

"What is strange about the 'surface' end of the molecule is that it occurs as an artifact when we apply electrical current across the transistor and hence can be considered 'manmade.' We have no equivalent form existing naturally in the world around us."

Klimeck, along with graduate student Rajib Rahman, developed an updated version of the nano-electronics modeling program NEMO 3-D to simulate the material at the size of 3 million atoms.

"We needed to model such a large number of atoms to see the new, extended quantum characteristics," Klimeck says.

The simulation showed that the new molecule is a hybrid, with the naturally occurring arsenic at one end in a normal spherical shape and a new, artificial atom at the other end in a flattened, 2-D shape. By controlling the voltage, the researchers found that they could make an electron go to either end of the molecule or exist in an intermediate, quantum, state.

This model was then made into an image by David Ebert, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, and graduate student Insoo Woo.

Delft's Rogge says the discovery also highlights the current capabilities of designing electronic machines.

"Our experiment made us realize that industrial electronic devices have now reached the level where we can study and manipulate the state of a single atom," Rogge says. "This is the ultimate limit, you can not get smaller than that."

Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080627163255.htm

Mark said...

09-18-2009 03:00
Korean Scientists Claim Breakthrough in 'Spintronics'

By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

South Korean researchers reported the first ever creation of a spin field-effect transistor, which had previously existed only in theory, claiming it to be a breakthrough in the emerging field of spintronics.

Short for spin-based electronics and also called magnetoelectronics, spintronics, is an up-and-coming technology that focuses on the harnessing of the spin of particles, with the ultimate goal of unlocking infinite computing power and storage from the process.

In a study published by peer-review journal, Science, a team of Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) researchers led by Han Suk-hee described the demonstration of a spin-injected field effect transistor, which is based on a semiconducting channel with two ferromagnetic electrodes.

The transistor's basic structure of source, gate and drain is similar to the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) model used for making microprocessors and other integrated circuits. However, Han's transistor is different in that the source and drain are made of ferromagnetic materials and that the injected spins are controlled by gate voltage.

Han said the research team has applied for patents for the technology described in the Science paper to a number of countries including the United States, Japan and European countries.

``If commercialized, spin-field effect transistors will have an enormous economic effect as it can be used for making logic devices with theoretically infinite power and storage, without making the devices get so hot. There will be a time when computers will be able to boot immediately without hesitation and the storage and microprocessors will be replaced by a single chip,'' Han said.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr

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http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2009/09/133_52065.html