Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Did You Know.........??????


* ...that in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (pictured) protons, accelerated to the energy of 7 TeV, move at 99.999999% of light speed and become 7,500 times heavier than at rest?
* ...that, at a speed of 299,792,458 m/s, light can travel to the Moon in 1.2 seconds?
* ...that the submarine telescope ANTARES, intended to detect neutrinos, may also be used to observe bioluminescent plankton and fish?
* ...that lasers can be used to separate two isotopes very efficiently?
* ...that neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful (5 mL) would have ten times the mass of all human world population?
* ...that every year, the Moon moves 3.82 cm away from Earth?
* ...that gold leaf is about 500 atoms thick?

Quantum Computing

Alanine, as used in NMR implementation of error correction. Qubits are dictated by spin states of carbon atoms.
A quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a quantum computer, it is measured by qubits. The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent and structure data, and that devised quantum mechanisms can be used to perform operations with this data. For a generally accessible overview of quantum computing, see Quantum Computing with Molecules, an article in Scientific American by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang.

Experiments have already been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits. Research in practical areas continues at a frantic pace; see Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmapfor a sense of where the research is heading. Many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research, to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.