'Laser Tweezers' Used to Sort Atoms 92
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.
quantum fuzzy logic (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm guessing the hurdle jumped here has something to do with construction techniques. But...there are already many ways to get atoms perfectly lined up with each other. Using a crystal, or part of one, would be one rather obvious idea. Indeed, the impression that the article gives that it's somehow a triumph to get atoms "perfectly" lined up with each other is silly: atoms naturally line up "perfectly" with each other, especially metal atoms like the caesium in the article. It's quite hard to get metal atoms not to "perfectly" line up together, i.e. to make amorphous (glassy) metallic materials.
Anyway, it's a nice little bit of single-atom manipulation, yes. One more trick you can do with laser cooling and tweezers, which may be interesting from the research perspective. But I don't see how it has anything very directly to do with quantum computing.
How many of these to make a computer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:quantum fuzzy logic (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not about getting them "aligned perfectly", rather its about controlling the atoms without introducing noise to the system. This is why the laser approach has a significant advantage. Although I agree that a clock speed of 0.5Hz isn't particularly impressive! but they do say its not about clock speed but number of operations per second (do I hear someone from AMD shouting "hell yeah!"). And with QC's the number of equivalent FLOPS you can do for something like quick searching rises exponentially with the number of atoms you have!
Re:quantum fuzzy logic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:University of Chicago has been doing this... (Score:1, Interesting)
for 5 years with micro lens array. The point is that both these experiments have little
to do with the Bonn experiment. What the Bonn guys do, is actualy sort the atoms out, so
that the have exactly one atom in every well of the standing light wave they use as a
conveyer belt. Chicago and Hannover have only limited control of how many atoms are in
each micro trap. Furthermore, the whole conveyor belt is just the start. Now, the conveyor
belt will be used to pull the atoms through a high finesse optical cavity to have entanglement
of the atoms in different sites, through interaction with the light field in the optical cavity.