New Nanodevice Creates a Near Perfect Electron Stream 98
SchrodingerZ writes "Scientists from the National Physics Laboratory of the United Kingdom have teamed up with the University of Cambridge to create a new electron pump that creates a single electron stream. "The device drives electrical current by manipulating individual electrons, one-by-one at very high speed." The pump takes single electrons, and pushes it over a barrier with an indent for the electron to fall into, and is then sent to the opposite side of the barrier with astounding precision. "By employing this technique, the team were able to pump almost a billion electrons per second, 300 times faster than the previous record for an accurate electron pump set at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA in 1996." Although the current was very small (150 picoamperes), this event could cause a shift from the ampere measure of current to a smaller, more precise unit of measurement for electrical current."
Errr (Score:4, Insightful)
"The pump takes single electrons, and pushes it over a barrier with an indent for the electron to fall into, and is then sent to the opposite side of the barrier with astounding precision. "
What is pushed over the barrier? What is sent to the opposite side of the barrier?
Sentences like this need rewriting, at the very least until they actually make some semantic sense.
Re:absolute measurements. NOT REALLY. (Score:0, Insightful)
Not really, bud. The fact that they've made it possible to count individual electrons is certainly nothing new. The notion of coupling one of these things to your household electrical devices to achieve more precise counts of the electrons passing through them is similar to using a laboratory scale at the store to weigh bananas. You don't NEED that much precision when you're talking about that much mass. Similarly, you don't need to know the exact number of electrons passing into and out of your washing machine, it's enough to know how many Watt-hours it uses in a cycle.
This technology will doubtless have applications, but to use it in the home as an alternative to your ammeter is kinda absurd. Might as well try to measure your children's heights to the picometer. It's pointless. As for the notion of redefining the amp, it's silly. The ampere already measures coulombs per second past a point in a circuit. If you have a device that can count up to about a billion electrons per second, there's no need to go inventing a new unit of current measure, you can just say the device passes 10^9 eps. As long as you make sure everyone reading what you wrote or listening to you knows that eps is "electrons per second" you're good.
If you don't like it, because you don't like dealing with numbers that big, there is an easy alternate solution. Just say "electrons per nanosecond". In the case of this pump, it's around 1. Problem solved. Let's not start making new units for no good reason. Amperes work just fine, thanks.