Transistor Made From Bose-Einstein Condensate 80
holy_calamity writes "US researchers have made a transistor from a Bose-Einstein condensate. They claim it to be the first step towards 'atomic circuits' that run with atoms instead of electrons. 'A small number of atoms can be used to control the flow of a large number of atoms, in much the same way that an FET uses a gate voltage to control a large electric current,' says lead research Alex Zozulya. The abstract of their paper is freely available."
Wouldn't this be slower? (Score:3, Insightful)
More probably faster (Score:5, Informative)
Electrons are areas of probability density for energy.
Photons are discrete packets of energy.
Energy is related to mass, most commonly, as E=mc^2.
In conventional circuits there is a signal passed by energy. That energy is passed in bulk as the movement of electricity, or the flux of the electron fields around the atoms which make up the conducting wire.
If one could deal in smaller amounts of energy--say the quanta required to excite an electron from one energy level to the next--then one is dealing arguably in portions of electrons. Arguably.
It's the same principle as the recent research using fiberobtic materials for processor fabrication. If one uses light, rather than electricity, then friction is minimized, energy lost to heat is minimized, and the bulk signal of photon flux can be modulated more quickly than the bulk signal of electron flux.
E=mc^2. It's all the same. You can pass bowling balls or you can pass bee-bees.
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Passing objects... (Score:3, Funny)
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On the contrary. If an electron is excited to a higher energy level by the addition of energy from a photon then, during the time it takes for the electron to go through whatever relaxation is necessary to re-emit a photon and regain its original state, the cloud of probability resembling that electron has more energy or more mass. Due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle we don't really know which it is.
> This is just the cha
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Re:Wouldn't this be slower? (Score:4, Informative)
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<NUMB3RS> Take for example a croquet ball. You could hit one ball with enough force to send it 15 feet to the hoop, but it will have to physically traverse that whole distance. But what if you had 10 feet of croquet balls in a row, one against another? You could hit the first ball with the same force and that force would be transmitted across the length of the adjoining balls faster than a lone b
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As long as you've got some force (the pressure on the atoms) causing movement, there will be "work" done, which will cause energy usage (i.e., power) - whether or not there is an external electrical field involved. Basic Newtonian physics.
Re:Wouldn't this be slower? (Score:5, Informative)
Electrons actually don't flow that fast through a wire. Less than a millimeter per second.
The reason why electricity is so fast, isn't because electrons are fast. It is fast for the same reason that if you have a pipe filled with water, and you start pumping more water in one side, water gushes out the other side immediately a great distance away, even though water isn't flowing through the pipe that quickly. This happens because although the water is slow, the pressure increases along the pipe much faster. Water is more or less incompressible, so pressure on one side of the pipe causes each water molecule in succession to transfer the pressure through it into the next without moving the molecules closer together by much. Thus the water moves almost as a single block, the force itself being only limited by the speed of light (ideally).
Similarly, although electrons are relatively slow to move, the voltage or electric pressure moves through the wire at the speed of light (practically at about 1/3 that speed). It is *this* speed barrier that we are currently running into in computer design, where the slowness of the speed of light over a few centimeters on a mother board will cause the signals in wires to get out of sync if one wire is slightly longer than the other. This happens there because although the voltage is moving incredibly fast, the clock rate of the circuitry is something like a billion oscillations a second. An electric pulse will only move slightly less than 10 centimeters in a billionth of a second.
I gotta ask... (Score:2)
Nanoseconds was meaning the time it takes for an electrical impulse to travel down 12 inches of low-resistance (for that time,) copper wire. This was a female Admiral in the Navy, responsible for Fortran, IIRC.
So electrons travel that slow? Which particle travels that fast to allow near-instant current, if not the electron? I'm really curious, as this has always stumped me.
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The electrons that make up regular current flowing in a conductor, yes.
If you want fast electrons, you'll need to accelerate them, preferably in a vacuum, using at least a couple of kV of voltage. Then you'll get to relativistic speeds.
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1. The "nanosecond" was a foot long piece of wire showing how far light travelled in that amount of time. The good Admiral used these wires to explain the latency in satellite communications. She later used them to show why computers needed to get smaller in order to get faster.
2. Admiral Grace Hopper was responsible for the design and development of the COBOL language. Fortran was invented by IBM's John Backus.
3. The travel of electrons is n
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Umm... With water, I think you mean the speed of sound. That's - by definition - the speed of an acoustic (i.e. mechanical) wave, the speed at which pressure changes propagate in a given substance. The speed of sound in water is quite high, but not quite the same order of magnitude as the speed of light. An electron, with its charge, is a quite different beast.
I just had a nerdgasm (Score:3, Funny)
TFA (Score:2, Informative)
Fscking slashtards
uh (Score:5, Funny)
Ewwww.....
Bose Einstein? (Score:3, Insightful)
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BBH
Ah hah! (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm. That could be a problem. I better remember to set the timer...
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Cheers
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How could this be practical? (Score:4, Insightful)
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3/4 of 0 = 3/4 * 0 = 0
Re:How could this be practical? (Score:5, Funny)
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[Warning: I have no idea what I'm talking about here...]
Well, we can make really tiny lasers. And there's a way to use lasers to cool stuff. If you could find a way to isolate the BEC and use active laser cooling, maybe you could turn this into something practical.
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No problem - we'll use the ones those now-passe electrons have just jumped!
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But exactly *what* fraction of 0 K?
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Quoting the paper, "The device is not optimized for performance but is arguably the simplest possible geometry showing behavior reminiscent of a transistor." This is just one of the first steps. Using BEC to make a functional quantum computer is a long way off.
I am a postgraduate student studying BEC, an
Simple. (Score:2)
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A fraction of 0? Is that less than a fraction of 1?
BBH
Yeah, but ... (Score:2)
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Yeah, you should see one... ;-) (Score:2)
I bet they use something similar...
Paul B.
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I would imagine.. (Score:1)
Atomic scale manufacturing? (Score:2)
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Bose Nova phenomenon (Score:1)
Regarding the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Maybe finally someone will find explanation for Bose Nova phenomenon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosenova [wikipedia.org]
It's like small thermonuclear explosion and seems like good explanation of all that Cold Fusion stuff:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/ [lenr-canr.org]
Free Abstract (Score:2)
They give the abstract away, but you have to pay for anything worth reading.
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Administrative Contact:
WIPOI
Shimon Gendlin
21 Reed Lane
Westbury, NY 11590
US
Phone: 516-368-4800
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Bose-Einstein Condensate (Score:1)
...just a thought... (Score:1)
No they didn't? (Score:2)
Two words: (Score:1)