Quantum Camera On a Silicon Chip 42
stefanparvu14 writes "Physicists in Switzerland and California have developed a new type of camera capable of imaging quantum correlations between pairs of photons. The details are presented in the current issue of the open-access publication New Journal of Physics. Unlike a conventional camera with a CCD imager, this camera is composed of Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) pixels implemented on a high-performance CMOS chip. One of the authors has provided more background for the non-physicist. Apparently, it could be used to verify the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates that are now starting to be produced in new ways."
No picture with the aricle ... (Score:4, Informative)
Because sometimes the camera is there ... and sometimes it isn't.
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Should have been called the CAT (Cant Always Tell).
Yeah ... I bet it runs Linux with a Maxwell Daemon to process the data in the background.
Bose-eisens-who-what?? (Score:5, Informative)
Confused yet? Me too.
Re:Bose-eisens-who-what?? (Score:5, Interesting)
A single particle in a confinement, with all the thermal energy removed, is distributed like a wave. That is, you're more likely to find the particle in the middle than at the edges. There's a formula for it (square of a sin, IIRC).
Bosons can all exist in the same state in the same place.
Couple these two facts, and you have a BEC. Basically, put a bunch of bosons in a box, turn the temperature way (way way) down, and you get this neat fuzzy blob of stuff, each particle in (or near) the "ground" (lowest energy) state, denser in the middle than at the edges, that's neither gas nor liquid nor solid. (Nor plasma, for the pedantic.)
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A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero.
What?!? I got all wet thinking about what kind of headphones might carry Einstein's name and you go ruin it with techno-speak!
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Because sometimes the camera is there ... and sometimes it isn't.
I beg to disagree with that. The real problem is , if you can find where's the camera, you cannot find where's the image.
The first link... (Score:2, Informative)
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...to this page [www.nbl.fi] while interesting on its own, doesn't appear relevant to the article.
Notice the URL. Notice who posted the article.
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...to this page [www.nbl.fi] while interesting on its own, doesn't appear relevant to the article.
Notice the URL. Notice who posted the article.
I know it is a page from the poster. But the page content doesn't match the link text.
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...to this page [www.nbl.fi] while interesting on its own, doesn't appear relevant to the article.
Notice the URL. Notice who posted the article.
I know it is a page from the poster. But the page content doesn't match the link text.
Exactly. It seems to me it was a quick throw in to get traffic to his site. A link obviously unchecked in the editing process.
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However, the act of you looking for it at the top of this thread changed its state, and now it is here.
This technology is going to revolutionize... (Score:1, Funny)
...the cat calendar industry.
Unless I missunderstand the scale... (Score:1)
"observing a quantum event changes that event"?
Re:Unless I missunderstand the scale... (Score:5, Informative)
You're already observing the photons and yes, it sure does change them. They're absorbed.
The difference here is that instead of just noting that "oh, yup, a photon was absorbed," you detect whether or not a pair of photons was absorbed at the same time.
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Doesn't this run into the small problem of:
"observing a quantum event changes that event"?
Yeah, but see, that's what's so great about it! Now we'll be able to fuck everything up at a quantum level too!
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observing a quantum event changes that event
Yes, so you can't use this to look up quantum skirts.
A step ahead (Score:1)
any condensed matter folks here? (Score:4, Interesting)
The abstract mentions "confirming the presence of true Bose-Einstein macroscopic coherence (BEC) of cavity exciton polaritons." Can somebody elucidate?
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If you have to ask, nobody can answer it for you.
Quantum mechanics is like that sometimes.
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I hear the engineer turned down his paycheck (Score:3, Funny)
Who cares? (Score:2, Funny)
X10 Tie-in (Score:1)
Would someone let me know when this product is available in the form of an X10 camera that will NEVER catch any naked girls in my house, spy on evil relatives, and see who dropped that toilet-clogger at my last party.
Original Reference [ibiblio.org]
Interview with X10 Creator [somethingawful.com]
The word "quantum" (Score:1)
Same with a multianode microchannel plate? (Score:1)
SPAD afterpulsing is probably not an issue for this project because it's looking at photon pairs, so uncorrelated random events occurring on all the SPADs won't affect the detection... but will decrease the counting/processing rate by bogging down the electronics.
For measuring concurrent events, I would've thought TTS would be much more critical, and you can't get much better than MCP-PMTs (10-20ps these days?). Just wond
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The thing I want to know is, if I take a picture of a cat with this camera, will it disappear??
I thought it would die!!!!!!
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Does this mean (Score:1)
we finally get our Heisenberg compensator?
Does it have to click every image? (Score:1)