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'Laser Tweezers' Used to Sort Atoms

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:41 PM
from the like-plucking-nosehairs-only-less-painful dept.
Science Technology
luckyguesser writes to tell us that Physicists at the University of Bonn are claiming to have knocked down one more quantum computing hurdle. Utilizing what they term "laser tweezers" they were able to sort and align seven atoms while capturing it on film. The plan is to construct a quantum gate using atoms imprinted with data.
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'Laser Tweezers' Used to Sort Atoms 25 Comments More /

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  • Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MickDownUnder (627418) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:44PM (#15744227)
    Something to get at even the most stubborn nasal hairs.

  • A little more detail (Score:5, Informative)

    by grapeape (137008) <mpope7 AT kc DOT rr DOT com> on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:45PM (#15744238) Homepage
    There is a bit more detail here, including a picture:

    http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Atom-Sorting-Ma chine-29616.shtml [softpedia.com]

  • Cheesy movie of the 80s (Score:4, Funny)

    by jellomizer (103300) * on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:45PM (#15744239)
    Young Einstin.

    Now Where is that chissel? ...BOOM...

    Then Yahoo Serious (as Einstine) Runs out with Beer with bubbles in his beer, chared from the Nuclear explosion.

    Which makes me wonder Could mass production of Nano Tools could lead to acedental Nuclear Explosions?

  • Tiny (Score:5, Funny)

    by Umbral Blot (737704) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:45PM (#15744241) Homepage
    That may very well be the world's smallest achievement.

  • Hoo Boy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by blcamp (211756) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:48PM (#15744269) Homepage

    Being able to sort and manipulate things down to the atomic level?

    This is going to make already messy divorce proceedings... even messier.

  • At last! Fricken' tweezers with fricken' laser beams attached!
  • Now if they could only make a version of them with pieces of zircon encrusted in them, I know a few people who might be interested in these tweezers.

  • Don't tell anyone with OCD (Score:3, Funny)

    by MECC (8478) * on Wednesday July 19 2006, @12:59PM (#15744368)
    Before anyone gets all righteous on me and mods me to death, I'm borderline OCD.
  • for G.W's brain cells

  • How does this help the grad student's resume? (Score:3, Funny)

    by karlandtanya (601084) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @01:06PM (#15744420)
    I mean, really--is Previous position: "Maxwell's Daemon" going to impress the HR department?

  • University of Chicago has been doing this... (Score:5, Informative)

    by VoidEngineer (633446) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @01:40PM (#15744664)
    for at least 5 years.

    Granted, it seems like their tweezers might be slightly more precise than Chicago's, but as far as I can tell, the article is little more than University of Bonn's press-release saying that they're playing in the same league. Granted, Chicago now has 5 years of experience patenting the process and developing applications with it.

    http://mrsec.uchicago.edu/Nuggets/Holographic_Opti cal_Tweezers/ [uchicago.edu]

    It should be noted Chicago's method is a little more "rubic's cubish" than Bonn's "conveyor belt" setup. Coupled with what is probably a different setup for the optical trap and laser mesh, and the 5 year difference in publications, I would doubt that there would be any patent conflict and that this will wind up being a competing product.

    Also, my guess is that these laser tweezers are going to play a part in the design of the first functional general nanoassemblers (of the style of Enterprise's 'replicators', not of the style of a grey goo assembler).

  • OB OCD (Score:4, Funny)

    by surfcow (169572) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @01:50PM (#15744740) Homepage
    Well, that aughta keep the obcessive comnpulsives busy for a while.

    "Did anyone see my isotope of Boron?"

  • In related news (Score:3, Funny)

    by Salsaman (141471) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @02:05PM (#15744858) Homepage
    The researchers also announced that the first full program for their quantum computers would be entitled "Duke Nukem Forever".

    "The game will be amazing", stated the researchers, "with state of the art graphics and the ability to play in multiple universes simultaneously."

    The first beta release was expected some 25 years from now.
     

  • Another way. mark Raizen (Score:3, Informative)

    by XchristX (839963) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @02:26PM (#15745007)
    The research group of Mark Raizen of the University of Texas at Austin has been working on similar techniques of 'tweezing' and 'laser culling'. Theoretically, in quantum tweezing, Gaussian lasers would sweep over a Bose-Einstein Condensate of ultracold atoms. The velocity of the sweep can be tuned in such a way that Landau-Zener tunnelling criterion is only satisfied for one atom in the reservoir and it tunnels into the sweeping beam.

    http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i7/e070401 [aps.org]

      In addition, 'laser culling' is a process by which a doppler-cooled set of atoms, kept in a MOT trap, can have the nuber of atoms whittled down by lowering the trap height. This can be done until a sub-poissionian regime is achieved and a definite number state is in the trap.

    http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2006/01/physics04.h tml [utexas.edu]

    http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.htm l [colorado.edu]

  • "Writing on individual atoms" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Flying pig (925874) on Wednesday July 19 2006, @03:20PM (#15745478)
    I think my intelligence is possibly being insulted by the original article. The analogies described seem to be a massive exaggeration of the capabilities of the process, intended to attract the attention of people with funding. "Hey, we can move atoms around on little conveyor belts. And we can write on them. Please give us lots and lots of money so we can build everything from a computer that can read the encrypted emails of a million terrorist suspects in one millisecond, down to free hard drives holding petabytes which have to have RFID tags attached so you can find them if you sneeze." Of course, how this is going to do anything which connects to the real world is quite another matter.

    Yes, it is interesting (I don't think I am a Luddite) but attempts to make leading edge practical physics understandable by governments and the great unwashed seem doomed to founder in misunderstanding. This is not a conveyor belt, this is not a tweezer, and nobody is writing anything on atoms. It's about as helpful as saying that I've succeeded in using a matter transfer process to increase the potential energy of a car (I've driven up a hill.)

    This may be a slightly excessive rant, but I do think that any attempt to popularise or spread understanding of science by proceeding from reality to an extremely high level analogical overview while completely missing all the science in the middle - is doomed to failure and symptomatic of a society with growing scientific illiteracy.

    • You don't program Quantum Computers, Quantum Computer Program You. Unless you are in Soviet Russa where you Program Quantum Computers.

    • One more step to kissing NP Complete good bye, and one more step to invalidating all current forms of encryption.

      Nonsense. First of all, nobody's really figured out much of a way to apply quantum computers to symmetric encryption, only to most public key cryptography. There are some ideas around that the fast database lookup you can do with a quantum computer should translate to some way to break symmetric encryption faster, but most current algorithms support long enough keys to combat that already.

    • I think you might be getting a little confused. For Quantum Computing you need the atoms/qbits to be entangled with each other and then seperated and for them to remain that way. You can't achieve this in a crystal (well you might achieve entanglement, but it'll be hard to remove the entangled atom and make it interact with a completely different atom without destroying the existing entanglement).

      Its not about getting them "aligned perfectly", rather its about controlling the atoms without introducing no

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