Posted 04.13.2010 at 11:34 am
7 Comments
Late last year, English scientists created the first real-world instance of spin ice, a long-hypothesized type of crystal that can behave as a magnet with only one pole. These monopole magnets could form the basis of quantum computing memory, so it was disappointing to find out that the spin ice only behaved as a monopole at -454 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists at Imperial College London have now revived the dream of monopole quantum memory by creating artificial spin ice that works at room temperature.
Large Scale Model of Artificial Spin Ice: Imperial College London, via Physorg
This discovery brings the use of magnetic monopoles as a data storage system for quantum computing much closer to practicality by circumventing many of the problems posed by last year's discovery. Now, instead of waiting years for engineers to figure out how natural spin ice can work at room temperature, quantum memory researchers only need to wait for the quantum computer processor developers to finally get on the ball and catch the hell up.
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"get on the ball and catch the hell up."
Ha, right on man, thats the old spirirt -- call it like you see it.
We can use that phrase for a lot of things, such as the people working on fusion, on affordable electric transportation, on cheaper transportation into space, on...........
Ron Bennett
Mommy Stuart said hell
"-454 degrees Fahrenheit" ... and what is that supposed to mean? Come on popsci get with the SI units.
-454 Fahrenheit is just a meaningless large negative number, calling it 3 Kelvin actually means something.
Now get it right before animemaster's mom gets home.
Ok, these may be stupid questions, just trying to flesh out the concept a bit. 1) Can the entire array be flipped on the fly to produce an opposite pole (i.e., north to south)? 2)Working on the nanoscale you would see areas of monopolarity, but at the macroscopic level wouldn't a net neutral charge make it a paperweight? 3) if it could be manipulated to show a single charge at the macroscopic scale, wouldn't this pose a serious violation of Conservation of energy? it seems that a switchable natural magnetic field could be used to do work without converting energy.
@TrevorKuczajda
you'd be right except that the charge can't flip - you just get a north pole (or S. pole depending on how it's manufactured) magnet with the field pointing one direction...and then pointing another direction. The field doesn't switch polarity, only position, and magnetic drag makes it so that any work done by the magnetic field has to be input into the magnet itself.
--)->
agreed with "TrevorKuczajda" a north pole moves along the magnetic field lines and since closed loop magnetic field lines requeires no energy to maintain (a regular magnet simply does it) if you put a north pole in a closed magnetic field it will keep on accelerating with no energy input i.e will create energy from nothing :S