Researchers Send Information Using a Single Particle of Light (vice.com) 56
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to research published Thursday in Science, physicists at Princeton University have designed a device that allows a single electron to pass its quantum information to a photon in what could be a big breakthrough for silicon-based quantum computers. The device designed by the Princeton researchers is the result of five years of research and works by trapping an electron and a photon within a device built by HRL laboratories, which is owned by Boeing and General Motors. It is a semi-conductor chip made from layers of silicon and silicon-germanium, materials that are inexpensive and already widely deployed in consumer electronics. Across the top of this wafer of silicon layers were laid a number of nanowires, each smaller than the width of a human hair, which were used to deliver energy to the chip. This energy allowed the researchers to trap an electron in between the silicon layers of the chip in microstructures known as quantum dots. The researchers settled on photons as the medium of exchange between electrons since they are less sensitive to disruption from their environment and could potentially be used to carry quantum information between quantum chips, rather than within the circuits on a single quantum chip. The ability to scale up this device would mean that photons could be used to pass quantum information from electron to electron in order to form the circuits for a quantum computer. "We now have the ability to actually transmit the quantum state to a photon," said Xiao Mi, a graduate student in Princeton's Department of Physics. "This has never been done before in a semiconductor device because the quantum state was lost before it could transfer its information."
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
Wow! I guess it's safe to say for once that this is a real quantum leap!
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as in.... the smallest possible leap?
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1 Planck Length.
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ahh.... so they're walking the Planck.
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It's the least they could do.
and what information was sent? (Score:2)
Wonker Special Christmas Chocolate. (Score:2, Funny)
I have a chocolate machine, it has two independant parameters, they are completely random and unconnected: a) Dark, Milk, or White chocolate. b) Hazelnuts, raisins, or brazil nuts.
At any time, I will get a random type of chocolate, sometimes dark, sometimes milk, sometimes white, with no descernable pattern . At any time I will get a random filling, sometimes, hazelnuts, raisins or even brazil nuts. The nut filling does not correlate to the chocolate type, or visa versa and neither correlates to time.
Fragme
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I shall give unto you the Great Secret for Homemade Chocolate, and it has to do with Conching. (Yeah, look it up...)
In garages, and attics, and basements the world wide are Rock Polishers. Toss some rocks in with some abrasives, and let rumble for a day or two. Out comes Polished Rocks. A hobby that has come and gone for Generations now. But...
Clean the old $5 Polisher out thoroughly, and add Chocolate Powder, Cocoa Butter, powdered Sugar, and whole Milk powder in proportions to taste, along with a selectio
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Re: Wonker Special Christmas Chocolate. (Score:1)
You spent a long time spining a yarn about a badly incorrect classical analogy of how quantum entanglement work. You also pretend like physicists say it is too complicated for others to understand, when really it is easy to understand with high school level math. It is only the popsci authors and writings like this that insist on not using basic algebra and end up making it look mysterious by insist it is too complicated to explain without bad analogies. Just do the simple math of Bell's inequality, and yo
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If just. (Score:2)
If just there was a word for "Single Particle of Light"...
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not just dumbed down, 'human hair' is merely an upper bound, presumably several orders of magnitude above the size we're talking.
We're used to talking about microchip circuits here - 20 vs 14nm feature sizes is normal. If these guys are building quantum traps, presumably it's at least in that size range, so why not just say to help us visualize what's going on?
I got the single particle of light ... (Score:1)
... but what's the message?
I can only determine one thing about it to the exclusion of all other things.
Can you do a followup with a goddam smoke signal?
Thanks.
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The message is that a sender exists.
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I got hit by a trillion light particles when I put the trash out.
I shaded my eyes and, looking in the general direction of the Sun, I said, "I see what you did there."
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Paul Revere already sent a message using, potentially, one "unit of light": one if by land.
And he most probably wasn't the first.
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Red October did similarly with, "One ping only."
Ok, now what? (Score:3)
Width of a human hair (Score:2)
How long is that in terms of football fields?
Re: Width of a human hair (Score:1)
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How long is that in terms of football fields?
English or metric football field?
Wave as it goes by! (Score:2)
Get back to me when they achieve the same thing with a single wave.