Re:It's a first step, of many... (Score 2)

Exactly. I don't want to be critical here, but the reporter did what reporter do, blew it out of proportion with out knowing what they were talking about. As those who may be lucky enough to impliment the manufaturing of such devices, we need to remember that there are some very large physical barriers that still need to be overcome before anything like this could be made.

1. The central atom is moved around and extracted by the STM tip, so if a device is going to use this we have to some how miniturize an STM like tip to mecanically remove atoms and place them when needed, most likely, one per elliptical ring. This would be a Nobel level achievement in and of itself! My opinion is that a mechanical (yes this is mechanical because it require physical movement) device would not be practical, but I would love to be proved wrong on this. I personally see a structure like this being used to resonate wave states generated by an applied voltage, thus allow for more a more quickly cycled device.

2. Another concern is stability. They had to operate at 4K in order to prevent thermal fluctuation to destroy the device. Personally, I don't want something that is 4K on my shirt. Also, how will the quantum states change (the miarge image) once the device has been embedded to protect the device from the environment (scratching, bumping, etc.), and once embedded can the atoms still be moved around.

3. One more major issue is how to make these devices. They made it atom by atom. How could this be done on the 10^9 or 10^12 scale of devices needing to be produced every day? Can this be cost effectively done? If it can't, then it will never reach us the consumer.

These are questions that need to be answered along with many more before we can ever use such devices practically. This is definitely a neat discovery, however, there are much bigger barriers than this to overcome if we are ever going to get this type of technology to the level where everyone can have one at a resonable cost and have it last long enough to justify spending the money. This represent the equivalent of another baby-step in the direction of getting such devices publically available. So, we need the mentioned IBM group and other groups to keep up the great work to help us break down some of these other barriers.