The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist

[groovychk]

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist

Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon - the building block for quantum computers.

In theory, quantum computers are far superior to classical computers. In practice, they are difficult to construct because quantum bits, or qubits, are extremely fragile. Even a slight knock can destroy stored information.

In the late 1980s, mathematician Michael Freedman, then at Harvard University, and Alexei Kitaev, then at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Russia, independently came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of storing qubits in properties of particles, such as an electron’s spin, they suggested that qubits could be encoded into properties shared by the whole material, and so would be harder to disrupt (New Scientist, 24 January 2004, p 30). “The trouble is the physical materials we know about, like the chair you’re sitting on, don’t actually have these exotic properties,” says Freedman.

Physicists told Freedman that the material he needed simply didn’t exist, but Joel Helton’s group at MIT might just prove them wrong. The material would be a string-net liquid with elementary and quasi-particles at the end of each string. Physicists could manipulate quasi-particles with electric fields, braiding them around each other, encoding information in the number of times the strings twist and knot, says Freedman. A disturbance might knock the whole braid, but it won’t change the number of twists - protecting the information.

“The hardware itself would correct any errors,” says Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.

Comments

[kyrie1618.livejournal.com]

Maybe they could use phonons. Quanta of sound, phonons have no position to speak of, they simply exist along a line of atoms in a crystal lattice.

It would be too much to call a phonon a particle. It's like a quanta of radio. Both everywhere and nowhere at once.

[aimingforpeace.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's impressive.