still awake

[tina1979]

I should be in bed, but I am not all that tired and I am bored...... I'm have Law & Order SVU on right now. My sister is out with a friend, my roommate is in her room and my daughter is asleep. I guess I am just sort of enjoying "me" time. What are you guys doing?

[GetMeOuttaDC]

I should be in bed, but I am not all that tired and I am bored...... I'm have Law & Order SVU on right now. My sister is out with a friend, my roommate is in her room and my daughter is asleep. I guess I am just sort of enjoying "me" time. What are you guys doing?

SURFING ON QLC, BABY!!! Headed towards a bath...

[stonemonkey]

I'm spending my lunch break surfing QLC because I'm avoiding a social BBQ with physicists downstairs. I should be out there 'networking', but eh....

[tina1979]

maybe thats what I need.. a nice hot bubble bath to relax. too bad I just got sucked into a rerun of the Dukes of Hazard. :rolleyes:

[tina1979]

I'm spending my lunch break surfing QLC because I'm avoiding a social BBQ with physicists downstairs. I should be out there 'networking', but eh....
I'd atleast go for the BBQ.... I was raised on championship BBQ and I don't pass it up as long as its good stuff. :huge:

[pisces2473]

I came home from the hospital, hopped on here, unpacked my work stuff, cleaned out the litter box, took out the trash and recyclables--all while listening to the end of Revelations (missed the middle driving home from the hospital), Law and Order:SVU and now the news. I should make lunch. I'm sorta tired, but not really. I need to do reading for school too. Oh it's 11:15. Sigh.

[tina1979]

there is never enough time in the day!
Is Chris feeling any better?

[stonemonkey]

I'd atleast go for the BBQ.... I was raised on championship BBQ and I don't pass it up as long as its good stuff. :huge:

oh I got some sausages and left. It's nothing fancy but it's cheap. I'm not a huge fan of hanging around physicists. They're all really weird.

[tina1979]

LOL!!! That sucks, but aren't you one?

[pisces2473]

there is never enough time in the day!
Is Chris feeling any better?
NOOOO kidding!

Yes, he's much better--they took him off the evil morphine, but they put the tube back in his nose down to his stomach, but that's getting rid of all the yucky stuff in his stomach. He showered again today (he did it yesterday too), walked around the floor a few times, was able to stand up and give me a REAL hug, had his glasses on for the first time since the 4th, and wanted to watch TV and just chill with me. YAY! They just have to settle his stomach down a bit...they did try letting him eat yesterday but he puked it all up. At least he's not weird or mean or anything. HE IS BACK! YAAAAAAAAY :huge: (and he doesn't remember much about the days when he was so out of it)

I think Australian BBQ is nothing like good ol' southern BBQ...

[stonemonkey]

LOL!!! That sucks, but aren't you one?

I like to think of myself as the next generation of young and funky scientists who are really cool and shake up the status quo. Yes, I'm living in my own fantasy world, but it's nice here.

Actually, I tend to lie about what I do. People freak out if I come out with phrases like 'quantum transport in semiconductor nanostructures'. It kinda kills the conversation.

[tina1979]

I think Australian BBQ is nothing like good ol' southern BBQ...
You're right about that!

I'm glad he's doing so much better and that hes back. I'll cross my fingers he gets to come home soon

[stonemonkey]

NOOOO kidding!
I think Australian BBQ is nothing like good ol' southern BBQ...

yeah, I think it's completely different, actually. we don't put ribs on the barbie. gourmet sausages are really trendy now.

[tina1979]

I like to think of myself as the next generation of young and funky scientists who are really cool and shake up the status quo. Yes, I'm living in my own fantasy world, but it's nice here.

Actually, I tend to lie about what I do. People freak out if I come out with phrases like 'quantum transport in semiconductor nanostructures'. It kinda kills the conversation.
I'm sure you are the next generation of oung and funky scientists. :)

I can see where that might cause a pause in conversation. I was raising my brow a bit. Kinda went over my head, but it sounds cool!

[tina1979]

yeah, I think it's completely different, actually. we don't put ribs on the barbie. gourmet sausages are really trendy now.
gourmet sausages? what do you do with the ribs if not put them on the smoker?

[stonemonkey]

yeah, I usually try not to sound so wanky and pretentious.

[tina1979]

you don't sound wanky and pretentious....

I tried to google it, but my computer sucks and wouldn't let me open the site.

[stonemonkey]

haha, yeah, it's a top secret military project, you don't have clearance to view it.

nah, I just don't like it when people use technical jargon nobody else understands, so I try to avoid it.

[tina1979]

thats understandable. so in a nutshell what do you do?

[and1grad]

I think its funny that this is where this conversation ended. :evil: :lol:

[stonemonkey]

sorry, wasn't trying to avoid the question, I actually got called away to do some actual work.

What do I do in a nutshell? I scream out "help, get me out of this nutshell!"

Right now I'm learning microelectronic device processing techniques in order fabricate nanometre sized structures in silicon with phosphorus. Ultimately, the goal is to build something called a quantum computer (http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020617/full/020617-3.html)


News
Published online: 19 June 2002; | doi:10.1038/news020617-3

Silicon quantum computer
Philip Ball
A quantum computer might be built using today's technologies.


Silicon technology has a head start over other quantum computing schemes.
A quantum computer - a new kind of computer far more powerful than any that currently exist - could be made today, say Thaddeus Ladd of Stanford University , Kohei Itoh of Keio University in Japan, and their co-workers. They have sketched a blueprint for a silicon quantum computer that could be built using current fabrication and measurement techniques1.

The microelectronics industry has decades of experience of controlling and fine-tuning the structure and properties of silicon. These skills would give a silicon-based quantum computer a head start over other schemes for putting one together.

Quantum and conventional computers encode, store and manipulate information as sequences of binary digits, or bits, denoted as 1s and 0s. In a normal computer, each bit is a switch, which can be either 'on' or 'off'.

In a quantum computer, switches can be on, off or in a superposition of states - on and off at the same time. These extra configurations mean that quantum bits, or qubits, can encode more information than classical switches.

That increase in capacity would, in theory, make quantum computers faster and more powerful. In practice it is extremely difficult to maintain a superposition of more than a few quantum states for any length of time. So far, quantum computing has been demonstrated with only four qubits, compared with the billions of bits that conventional silicon microprocessors handle.

Several quantum-computing demonstrations have used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to control and detect the quantum states of atoms floating in solution. But this beaker-of-liquid approach is unlikely to remain viable beyond ten or so qubits.

Many researchers suspect that making a quantum computer with as many qubits as a Pentium chip has transistors will take the same kind of technology, recording the information in solid-state devices.

Chip off the old block

In 1998, Bruce Kane of the University of New South Wales in Australia showed that solid-state quantum computing was conceivable, but not practical. He suggested that atoms of phosphorus in crystalline films of silicon could store qubits that could be read and manipulated using NMR sensitive enough to detect single atoms2.

The device proposed by Ladd and his colleagues is similar, but more within the reach of current technical capabilities. They suggest that qubits could be encoded in an isotope of silicon called silicon-29, or 29Si.

Itoh's group in Japan believes it has the capability to grow grid-like arrays of 29Si chains atom by atom on the surface of the most abundant silicon isotope, 29Si. A tiny magnet and radio waves would then be used to control the magnetic quantum states of 28Si.

Crucially, each qubit would be stored not just in a single 29Si atom but in many thousand copies, one in each 29Si chain. This would avoid the problem of making measurements on single atoms. The readout could be performed using magnetic resonance force microscopy, which detects the oscillations of a thin bridge in which the rows of silicon atoms are embedded.

The details are subtle, but the point, the researchers say, is that the device is feasible without "unrealistic advances in fabrication, measurement, or control technologies". All they have to do now is build it.

[and1grad]

I skipped past a lot of that but, why do I want a "switch" to be both off and on?

[stonemonkey]

It's because the number of calculations you would be able to do would rise exponentially quickly. Instead of doing calculations in series, you'd be able to do them in parallel.

When scientists try to sell this idea, they always turn to a thing called 'Shor's algorithm', which just uses this idea of being able to have switches that are in a superposition of being both 'on' AND 'off' at the same time to factor large prime numbers. This actually has a practical application in terms of security codes and encryption, which is based on the principle that it would take the fastest supercomputers in the world billions of years to factor prime numbers to crack the codes. With a quantum computer, you'd be able to break every code on earth in seconds. You'd also be able to create simulations more realistic and accurate than ever before, because you'd be able to juggle exponentially larger amounts of data at the same time.

This is still all very far off though, at least 20 years before we get a primitive device like this.

[stonemonkey]

I knew I'd eventually send everyone to sleep. Still awake? Not anymore...

[Deadend]

I'm still awake. Should we start another insomniacs thread?

[stonemonkey]

Haha, yeah, we need our own graveyard shift thread

[and1grad]

Ok...b/c I have limited exposure to computer science you're gonna have to bear with me here. If a switch is already both on and off, doesnt the code still have to tell the switch which parameter to run? If so, why does this type save time rather than give a possibility to more errors?

[stonemonkey]

No, that's because you're using classical computer code that deals with classical bits. A quantum computer would have to be programmed using a set of theory separate from classical computing. In this research area, the theory is actually ahead of the experimental results. The theoreticians have already mapped out quantum computer programs that can speed calculations, but nobody's managed to build the hardware to carry them out.

There are errors that are introduced, but there's also something called an 'error-correcting' algorithm (which I admit, I don't understand) which states that if you can keep the rate of errors that are incurred by the computer below a certain threshold (1 in 10000) then the computer should be able to correct its own mistakes.

The reason it ends up saving time is because the excess amount of calculations that it can do outweighs the errors incurred.

[Deadend]

StoneMonkey:

So your'e actually doing hardware for Quantum Computing? That's Awesome! My roomate (and one of my best friends) is actually working for our Institute for Quantum Computing here on campus and will in September be off to do his Masters in the subject. So I've heard a *little* bit about it.

My undertsanding is that Schodingers pops up alot in it and that for this reason there's a "maybe" bite as well as the standard "on/off". That's bassically all I know.

[stonemonkey]

Take two classical bits, that can be either on OR off, call these two states 1 and 0. They can be both off (00) or both on (11) or in opposite states (01 and 10). So at any given time it can be in 1 of 4 possible configurations.

Now think of them as two quantum bits (called qubits). This means removing the constraint that they have to be one state or the other. Qubits can be in both states at the same time. 2 qubits can simultaneously be in 4 states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. With 3 qubits, it's even more, 8 states are possible (000, 001, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111) all at the same time. So with 3 qubits you're already able to do 8 operations in the time it takes you to do one single operation with classical bits.

Each time you add another qubit, the number of patterns that you can store at the same time doubles, leading to an exponential increase in processing power.

[stonemonkey]

My roomate (and one of my best friends) is actually working for our Institute for Quantum Computing here on campus and will in September be off to do his Masters in the subject. So I've heard a *little* bit about it.


No shit?! Which campus is it?

The hardware side of it is a lot less glamourous. Just pushing current technology past what it was originally designed for. You're right about Schrodinger's equation being involved in it, that's what sets this kind of computing apart from conventional computing.

[and1grad]

Oh ok. I understand that...which I believe...ups my nerd quotient by a magnitude of 10. Damn.



psst...Did anybody catch the reference to 1 & 0 right there? Anybody? Hello?

[maxwell78]

Well, I'm up...but it's still fairly early out here. But this Quantum Computing stuff is WAY beyond my ability to understand. :D

[stonemonkey]

I think we can call this thread well and truly jacked. Sorry about that, tina

[maxwell78]

I think we can call this thread well and truly jacked. Sorry about that, tina
She'll be fine. :D ;)

[tina1979]

I think we can call this thread well and truly jacked. Sorry about that, tina
Nope. Not jacked!
Sorry guys. If you recall I was the first one to ask what he did.

Stone-
WOW! I never could understand binary in school. Hell! still don't understand it completely, but I definately get an idea. You are working on amazing stuff.
Oh! Sorry I disappeared. The neighbor came over and by the time she left it was too far past my bedtime to ignore anymore.

[mishl982]

I thought I would get smarter reading some of the posts in this thread, but actually I feel dumber, lol. :razz:

[Angyl]

^ I feel the same way. I never understand this stuff, but it all sounds so much cooler than what i do.

[and1grad]

Just think of that movie "Weird Science." Its JUST like that.

[Angyl]

hah. I loved that movie.

[tina1979]

Just think of that movie "Weird Science." Its JUST like that.
lol! I haven't seen that movie in years.