Monday, January 26, 2009

Remarkable

How low can you go? : Nature News

This is pretty mind boggling, even if it is of no practical application (yet!):

The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world — the fording of electrons across a transistor, or hard drives reliant on electrons' intrinsic spin — are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set: no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron.

But now, researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have used another feature of the electron — its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states — to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces. By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron.

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