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On Diamond-Based Quantum Computing

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jun 01, 2007 08:57 PM
from the expensive-processing dept.
Education Supercomputing Science
Roland Piquepaille writes "Quantum computing is usually associated with extremely low temperatures. Physicists at Harvard University have shown that diamonds can be used to create stable quantum computing building blocks at room temperature. A nitrogen vacancy in diamond could lead to quantum registers able to store or retrieve data. '"The problem is, what makes single nuclear spin so stable - its weak interaction with its surroundings - also prevents us from directly manipulating it," Lukin says. "How do you control something that can't interact with anything?" You do it gingerly and indirectly, the Harvard physicists report in Science. They found that nuclear spins associated with single atoms of carbon-13 - which make up some 1.1 percent of natural diamond - can be manipulated via a nearby single electron whose own spin can be controlled with optical and microwave radiation.'"
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story

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  • radiation? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ookabooka (731013) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:07PM (#19360251)
    optical radiation? so. . like cyclops rays or something?

  • New Advertising Campaign (Score:4, Funny)

    by Wicko (977078) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:16PM (#19360287)
    Nothing says I love you like a diamond quantum computer.

  • the problem with diamonds (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Original Replica (908688) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:17PM (#19360297) Journal
    Maybe this will help address the problem of diamonds, namely De Beers. The diamond industry is one of completely false scarcity and the result of a monopoly on a natural resource. The effect is not only rediculous prices for shiny rocks, but lots of blood shed. As all diamonds on the market serve to feed this beast, every diamond is a "conflict diamond".

    • Re:the problem with diamonds (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2007, @09:33PM (#19360379)
      no this will not influence the crap with DeBeers. They have an emotional brand. They took a rock of little interest gem wise and made it into something based on a monopoly and pandering. Diamond good for cpus will have no greater impact on diamond gem prices than synthetic ruby or sapphire has had on prices of those gems. Now business that are into the gem quality diamond business, making better diamonds than the earth does, they might. But seeing as the CPU's will likely be made via chemical vapor deposition, or physical vapor deposition (probably on a Tungston sulfide coated substrate), or whatever, there's not much overlap in the technology.

      You want to kill DeBeers, better education. A diamond from a press isn't any more special than a diamond dug up by an oppressed 3rd worlder. If anything, the ability to customize them makes them more special. But try convincing people raised on a diet of dug up diamonds feel and radiate love.
      • Actually, if they start making diamond crystals for semiconductors on the same scale that they had to learn how to make silicon crystals, then you'll see far-beyond-gem-quality diamonds that make the Hope Diamond look like the crumb off a bagel. At that point, DeBiers had better be looking for another kind of stone to throw their marketing weight behind.
          • Wow, I'm impressed. Maybe what your relating is common knowledge, but you go my respect.

            I've got a question for you. The Bohr model of an atom shows neutrons and protons as 'atomic' sub-particles. How accurate is that? When atoms form a crystal, is the position of the nucleus fixed or is it suspended, able to change its position? For example, I can imagine that carbon, with a valence of 6 (has 6 protons) and a 'weight' of 12 (usually) would have an asymmetrical shape to its nucleus. This would cause a va
          • It's really awesome that you managed to spell "Tungsten" three different ways in the first two lines of your comment. It's OK, I'm not detail-oriented either, and the rest of your post is informative.
      • It's worth pointing anybody that will read something, long as it is, to this:

        http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond [theatlantic.com]
      • They took a rock of little interest gem wise and made it into something based on a monopoly and pandering.

        Yeah, noone was interested in diamonds before De Beers. I mean they used them as landfill and for other [wikipedia.org] unimportant [wikipedia.org] stuff [wikipedia.org].

        I don't like De Beers either but please don't use hyperbole to ruin a perfectly valid argument.

      • actually synthetic diamonds contain no flaws. de beers painted themselves into a corner with that one, when in the 80s the russian mines found tons of diamonds. de beers shit themselves. the russian diamonds were small. de beers had to change their strategy. size had to no longer matter, so they came up with the idea that bigger wasn't better, but it was then about quality and flawlessness. funny, now that synthetic diamonds contain no flaws, de beers is trying to say they those are inferior to 'real' dia

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Bottlemaster (449635)

      Maybe this will help address the problem of diamonds, namely De Beers. The diamond industry is one of completely false scarcity and the result of a monopoly on a natural resource. The effect is not only rediculous prices for shiny rocks, but lots of blood shed. As all diamonds on the market serve to feed this beast, every diamond is a "conflict diamond".

      s/diamond/natural gem diamond/

      TFA doesn't specify what kind of diamonds, but I see no reason to assume that carbon-13 from synthetic diamonds doesn't have t

    • actually the more diamonds on the market decrease value. hence the 'false scarcity'. more diamonds means less scarcity which means more supply to overpower demand.

  • What the article does not cover (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DaveWick79 (939388) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:18PM (#19360313)
    Is just how much diamond it takes to achieve this. Are they working with microparticles of diamond shavings, or with larger pieces. If they are using some kind of diamond dust, how do you arrange this to get any kind of usable array for storage?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bender0x7D1 (536254)

      Well, if they are dealing on the quantum level, we are talking about single atoms which don't take up a lot of space, even on a speck of dust.

      In addition, quantum computing isn't concerned with a large number of bits - although more is still better. I'm not sure if the info is still accurate, but the record number of qubits so far is 7 [wisegeek.com], so even a few hundred qubits would be a huge breakthrough. I guess the question is: How many qubits can spin on the head of a pin (or a speck of diamond dust)?

      • wouldn't a single atom of diamond just be carbon (or something)? I'd imagine this is at least at the crystaline level?

        • If you are dealing with a single atom, carbon or otherwise, you wouldn't need much substrate to hold and isolate the single atom you are interested in. So it might be at the crystaline level, but it might involve only a few atoms in the crystal.

      • I guess the question is: How many qubits can spin on the head of a pin ?

        Or, how many queues can a qubit bit if a qubit could queue bits?

  • the Moore's Law is eventually invalidated (Score:3, Funny)

    by hackingbear (988354) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:30PM (#19360365)
    When computers are built with this technology, their prices will no longer tumble every 18 months! In fact, they will eventually become precious collectibles.
  • Haven't you ever played final fantasy? Crystal based computers would be far to powerful, we could never win in a fight against them. If they went haywire, no amount of Will Smiths or Neos could save us.
    • News flash: Your current computer you just used is "crystal based". In fact, silicon and diamond have the exact same cubical diamond lattice crystal structure.

  • what makes single nuclear spin so stable


    What nuclear? Missile?
  • Aha, so the stargate series were onto something!
  • How efficient is the transduction of electromagnetic energy into a diamond convertible into the electron spins that can "charge" nuclear spins? How efficient is the discharge? And how much energy can be stored in these spins, multiplied by 1.1% of the C atoms in a synthetic 1mm^2 diamond?
    • I don't know about the energy, but my back of the envelope, using Avogadro's number, density of diamond etc. gives me 1.66 x 10^18 carbon13 atoms in a 1mm^3 diamond, and if 1% can be used, thats 16,600,000,000,000,000 quantum bits, not bad.
  • that quantum computer hardware has been making strides recently, I have to think:
    Are we going to be thwarted by the difficult of developing software for quantum computers?

    I'm no expert on quantum computing, but I can imagine there's a huge amount to think about when programming even trivial applications for it - not so long ago we had an article on parallel programming being too hard [slashdot.org] - this is just with normal computers where everything is clearly defined in ones and zeroes. I certainly can't imagine d
    • weellllll... it'll be a bitch at first because they'll essentially have to learn to walk all over again, but then someone will write an assembly equivalent for it, then not long after that there will be c and then python applications for quantum processors
  • As soon as we can dope them to make transistors out of them, perhaps we'll see these in the consumer pc/electronics market. I wonder how much more efficient as far as energy loss these could be?

  • As Wired has been reporting [wired.com] for years [wired.com], synthetic diamonds are becoming more and more readily available, and they are not less perfect or more expensive than their dug-up counterparts. Frankly, after watching Blood Diamond, if the truth of things is at all close to that-- my penchant for quantum computing projects aside-- I'm glad to see more reasons for cheap mass diamonds.

  • Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age [wikipedia.org], anyone?

  • How to sell your research (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eukariote (881204) on Saturday June 02 2007, @03:31AM (#19361723)

    This story is a classic example of selling your research by pretending it may have a practical application. Do something with a quantum system, and sell it by saying it has a potential quantum computing application. Do something on a nanoscopic scale, and call it nanotechnology. Do something with a semiconductor, and say it is for future chips.

    What these researchers have done is pretty standard fare: the nitrogen vacancy defect in diamond is photo-active center that can and has been studied extensively by optical excitation. The unpaired electron spins of these centres can be manipulated via microwaves. With a low concentration and tight focus, you can study individual centers. Some of these will have and adjacent carbon-13 instead of the more abundant carbon-12 neighbor. Its magnetic moment can be observed through its interaction with the electron spin. Cute, but nothing what so fucking ever to do with any kind of practical application.

    Science has become colonized by hypesters, marketeers, and slick talking band wagon jumpers. All in pursuit of that next bit of funding and fame.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by diqrtvpe (929604)
      While I agree in principle with what you're saying, the fact is that if you don't sell your research to have some type of real-world application, you very likely won't get funded at all. I just finished an undergraduate physics degree, and the research I did there was done purely for the sake of finding out about new materials, how they structure themselves, and how they behave. However, we couldn't write down "science for the sake of science" on the grant proposal, because otherwise we would've been sol.
  • From the article:
    "atomic nuclei, fundamental building blocks of matter with sub-nanometer dimensions"
    This is like calling a fly an animal of sub-kilometer dimensions.
  • The article doesn't say. But if so, this could be cool.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by jollyreaper (513215)

      Slashdot users should be covered in horse semen!

      Horse semen!
      Nice try at starting a new meme but Slashdotters prefer hot grits, preferably on Natalie Portman.
    • yeah I dropped acid once and saw dancing before me the solution to the unified field theorem but when i went to grab my pen it turned into a grasshopper and skitted away :-(

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cp.tar (871488)

      Actually, artificially-made diamonds are rather cheap.

      What is more, if the price of 'real' diamonds weren't artificially (sic!) kept high, they too would be cheap as dirt.

      My guess, though, is that only man-made diamonds would be suitable for that, just like rubies for lasers - they're cleaner.

      • Blah blah diamonds.. blah blah dirt-cheap ... blah blah profiteering gluttons... blah blah electron and the switch.

        So uh, when do we get guns to go hunt down those DeBeers goons so I can have my Quantum-core Pentium ? Oh and how do you overclock those things anyway ?

    • Excuse me, but where's the problem?

      I thought this! was! Slashdooooot! where no-one ever reads the articles anyway.

      No scripts would be needed if you just behaved like any other Slashdotter.

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