Posted on 08/21/2006 7:17:02 PM PDT by annie laurie
A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology, researchers say.
A quantum bit, or "qubit", is analogous the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing "0" and "1", quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.
This means quantum computers can essentially perform multiple calculations at once, giving them the potential to be exponentially more powerful than conventional computers ...
'Breakthrough experiment'
Researchers have also created qubits from the "up" or "down" spin-states of electrons on quantum dots. But they lacked the ability to control the state of a single electron well enough to perform calculations using them. A team led by Lieven Vandersypen at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has now created a device that can manipulate a single electron using conventional microchip fabrication technology.
"This is a breakthrough experiment," says Guido Burkard, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who was not involved in the research. "A major benefit of making a qubit using this method is that they are built upon existing semiconductor technology." This should make the qubits easier to scale up into larger systems, he adds ...
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientisttech.com ...
Amazing. What will the next 50 years bring us? (assuming tomorrow isn't the end of the world)
What if we accelerate to the speed of light but don't otherwise change when we were going to measure it? (I really don't even understand what I'm asking....)
ping
With this kind of computing speed, perhaps pcs will soon acquire 'artificial intelligence' and then determine that humanity is the enemy....
Day of Teminator???
Only if computers devolop liberal tendencies.
Imagine a computer as intelligent as a genius-level human (150+ IQ) but able to process information a million times faster than a human. Now imagine a network of a million of these computers all working together. Wow. Let's be sure to install a way to turn the whole thing off, just in case.
They better hurry and get this down to the marketing folks!
Not to worry. They're running Windows XP.
If the spin is 'manipulated' it's an unnatural quantum electrodynamic action.
Schroedinger's Cat anyone?
So, would quantum computers be faster, hold more data?
More intelligent computers won't be sentient computers.
Problem is : qubits are still the olde morse code of dit-dah-dit : 01101110 : rapidly flipping a switch on and off is all digital is. It comes from turing(who committed suicide)and the early ENIAC days when they used thermally noisy vacuum tubes, the best signal-to-noise ratio was on-off-on-on-off... With photonics there is a vastly better way to compute : light wavelengths : a million+ vs the 2 of dit-dah-dit digital. Storage? Slow light(down to 37 mph). Prisms, lenses, mirrors, fiber optics and source? A 25 watt incandescent light bulb should do. Then there's intensities, polarization angles....your own color TV screen could list a number so HUGE, and thus information, that you could never read it in arabic numerals...every .1 second. The tools are all there, why hasn't anybody made a photonics computer, and left qubits in the dust?
Yes, artificial cognition would be a real breakthrough.
But although they could be smart, they should not have the same rights as humans. If the smartest chimpanzee is smarter than the dumbest human (a very long stretch, even including infants), the chimpanzee is still an animal and the human is still a human. For example, the chimpanzee could be eaten, but the human shouldn't be.
IBM Research
Silicon nanophotonics
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/photonics.index.html
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