Crystals And Lasers Help to Create Nanostructures

Spanishfly writes: "Physicsweb.org is reporting that Dieter Meschede of the University of Bonn in Germany and colleagues have created a three-dimensional interference pattern (holographic crystal). A cesium atom laser is fired into the crystal and uses the pattern generated on the crystal to position the atoms from the laser to create nanostructures. This new technology could be the future of optical circuits and could become an integral part of the semiconductor industry."

fast pace looks promising

[DrSkwid]

There seems to be a fast pace to the announcements from the laser & crasytalography world atm. I'm pleased because It's the kind of buzz and hype we need to support the flaky tech industry.

XP has failed to set the world on fire. I think the Linux buzz has been and gone (probably for the best, consolidation is what we need now).

The CPU people seem to have hit a plateau. We just don't seem to need any more raw speed. The GFX people have hit the same place too me thinks. HD storage density is now at a place where we have more storage in our computers than we can readily generate data to fill. We've got broadband. Okay you can never really have too much of these things but ram & hd doublers are very much a thing of the past and my network connection is rarely maxed out.

What does that leave?
What technologies are going to drive us to spend?

If I knew I wouldn't say, I'd be investing ;)

Roll on crystalline storage and optical computers!

Re:fast pace looks promising

[Rocko Bonaparte]

What do you expect? Hardware continues to make a profit, albeit not as strong as during the .com boom. Hardware is a tangible, manufactured product. Of course, what we do with it is their own business. So research in these kind of technologies goes on.

What is NOT happening is this "pleateau" you talk about. Chip sizes continue to shrink, improving speed. Moore's Law is still in effect. I see an old AnandTech article predicting 10Ghz by 2005

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1379
[sorry, I'm a wuss that hasn't figured out pasting links yet]

The fact is the fast the CPU gets, the less efficient the software is to run on it. Not to say programmers are doing a bad job, just rather the engineering behind sees they can speed up turnaround. In other words, now that the processor speeds doubled, they can whip out the same software in 2 months that would have taken a year of optimized code.

Back in the day, you needed assembler to get anything to run reasonably well. Then unoptimized C (not making this a rule of thumb. Now we have virtual machines and scripting languages up the wazoo. You could make an argument everything is just a bunch of code held together with duct tape.

So as long as CPU's get faster, software turnaround will follow.

Re:fast pace looks promising

[DrSkwid]

y i know all that,

the plateau I meant was demand rather than technological pace

The high end and low end workstation in retail stay roughly the same. I htink people just feel they need to get a new PC, I know I do that too. I just want this years model, like people always wanting a new car.

Also ehat I mean is we've almost reached a plateau in our delight in the novel. Do 2ghz chips give you the same thrill as 1ghz did? 5ghz? 10Ghz is the next milestone but that only seems about 5 years away.

We need a new thrill. We've got LCD panels and a ton of storage, something cool to do with lasers could probably be it. I know I'll try and buy a 3d crystal storage mechanism as soon as i can if you can whip the crystal out and show people.

Too blaze

I WANT A REPLICATOR!

Replicator-Inspired?

[Nyphur]

I wonder if the idea of firing a particle beam through a crystaline structure in order to resequence the atoms in a particular way was inspired by Replicatros from Star Trek. Although smaller new technologies are almost always just advancements on old ones (e.g. The first car was just a horse and carraige but without the horse.), Large leaps in scientific research on new concepts are usually derrived from science fiction.

They already have a small machine (not exactly portable yet, but they're working on it) capable of obtaining several types of medical information at once - much like the medical tricorder from Star Trek, and the hypospray has already been invented and was successfully tested in England on children who were receiving their "BCG". It forces the liquid through the pours in the skin, causing a slight inflamation in the skin for about 10 minutes, but leaving no scar and the injection itself having no pain.

With all of this, I can't help but think where this new technology will lead. I do hope that in my lifetime I witness the storing the patterns of whole objects digitally on a microchip which releases requenced electrons into a container containing some of one of the liquid-crystal forms with 5 carbons which temporarily hardens on being struck with electrons. Entire objects could be cretaed from an accelerated particle stream, including smaller components for electronic devices, remarkably improving the speed of miniaturisation and the quality of miniaturised products, aswell as boosting productivity because it would be a much faster production method.

This will certainly be a very welcome technology when developed further.

Thank the X-ray Crystallography guys for this

[CowbertPrime]

X-ray Crystallography and Diffraction studies enables us biologists and other structural-materials scientists to resolve atomic structure in say, proteins. We can now use the interference data collection methods that we normally use for near monochromatic x-rays diffracting through our favorite protein crystals to do other nifty things.

Smaller, faster, more secure

[Default.cfg]

Magnetic bits and transistor elements are shrinking rapidly. They could reach the atomic scale within the next few decades. But matter on a small scale can have very odd properties. How will engineers and designers exploit a world dominated by quantum effects?

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it! Shocking indeed to find that quantum bits, or qubits, can be both 1 and 0 at the same time! Or that it can be impossible to eavesdrop on a message sent as qubits! Scientists are exploiting such quantum weirdness to build quantum logic gates as a step towards a super-powerful quantum computer. In other work they are inventing ultra-secure crytography systems in which data is coded in the quantum states of individual photons.