Category: Nanodot

from the poke-n-prod dept.
Will Ware pointed out on slashdot that two phenyl (C₆H₅) radicals have now been pushed together to form a molecule of biphenyl.

Saw-Wai Hla, Ludwig Bartels, Gerhard Meyer, and Karl-Heinz Rieder, writing in [Phys.Rev.Lett. 85:2777-2780 25Sep2000] describe forming phenyl radicals from iodobenzene, pushing two radicals together mechanically, and forming a bond between them to yield a biphenyl molecule. All of this was done with an STM.

from the keeping-the-little-ones-in-line dept.
alison writes "Scientists at the University of Bielefeld in Germany have come up with a new electromagnetic method of controlling the motion and orientation of polar molecules simultaneously. Control of the motion of Bose-Einstein condensates along wires had already been demonstrated by a group in Austria. Ewan Wright of the University of Arizona tells me that arbitrary hard-to-condense atoms can now be B-E condensed by placing them in a trap with an easy-condensing species to which they transfer energy. This is not unlike a common scheme in lasers where an easy-to-pump molecule transfers energy to another molecule with a desirable transition, e.g. N₂ gas in with CO₂ in a CO₂ laser.

I'm convinced now more than ever that a potential 'assembler' will be a vacuum system with interwoven laser beams, electric and magnetic fields that energy-select species, orient them and transport them to a surface."

from the how-many-bits-on-the-head-of-an-electron dept.
Michael Dale noticed this in EETimes. "Interesting development in the quantum computer realm. '…Bucksbaum used a laser to encode parallel phase reversals along the waveform of an atom's electrons – a pulsating stream of 8-bit phase reversals. A second reference stream enabled the researchers to read back out the original bits by decoding the phase reversals, thereby recovering the stored information like a data register…'

Bucksbaum claims there is no 'theoretic limit to how long a string of 1s and 0s you can store in one'. "