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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Physicists at the University of Bonn have managed to create optical hollows and more complex patterns into which the light of a Bose-Einstein condensate flows. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new generation of computers. The researchers are now presenting their results in the journal Nature Photonics.
Light particles (photons) occur as tiny, indivisible portions. Many thousands of these light portions can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled.
The artist's rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green).
The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates.
Prof. Martin Weitz from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn attracted attention among experts in 2010 when he produced a Bose-Einstein condensate from photons for the first time.
In his latest study, Prof. Weitz' team experimented with this kind of super-photon. In the experimental setup, a laser beam was rapidly bounced back and forth between two mirrors. In between was a pigment that cooled the laser light to such an extent that a super-photon was created from the individual light portions. "The special thing is that we have built a kind of optical well in various forms, into which the Bose-Einstein condensate was able to flow," reports Weitz.
Journal Reference: David Dung, Christian Kurtscheid, Tobias Damm, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger, Martin Weitz & Jan Klärs: Variable Potentials for Thermalized Light and Coupled Condensates, Nature Photonics, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2017.139
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:54AM
LOL. Pretty much all the really cool advances that you mention are helped out by quantum computers. Using them allows us to solve problems in ways we haven't thought of before. Machine learning and AI are creating algorithms that no human being can understand, yet they work. Think of quantum computers as being a very powerful tool that scientists can use to bring about the creation of the aforementioned inventions. Stepping stones...
It does remind of photosynthesis. There was an article here way back about how we figure out why photosynthesis was 100% efficient all the time. Which is absolutely incredible if you believe the only thing driving that accomplishment was evolution. I mean, the odds right? Being vastly simplistic I'm sure, there are an infinite number of ways the cell could capture the energy of the light, with varying degrees of efficiency. However, there does exist one of them that is perfect. The trick of the cell was to try ALL ways at the same time and then choose the perfect way, every time. Maybe evolution didn't evolve the perfectly efficient photosynthesis process we see in nature, and simply by creating those structures they were able to use a quantum effect. In any case, perfect is always impressive. I found the article about it here [scientificamerican.com].
Quantum computers are an important avenue of research and will likely provide us a tool to create your dreams.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.