Spintronics: A new way for digital data bank (NPR)

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Like semiconductor computer chips rely on electricity - positive or negative - charges for storing data. Using magnets high power laboratory, researchers have developed a new way to store the data in the spin of the nucleus of an atom.

HYNIX/AFP/Getty Images Semiconductor chips computer like rely on electricity - positive or negative - charges for storing data. Using magnets high power laboratory, researchers have developed a new way to store the data in the spin of the nucleus of an atom.

Scientists at the University of Utah have taken an important step towards the day when the digital information can be stored in spin of the nucleus of an atom, rather than as an electric charge in a semiconductor.

Scientists Setup requires powerful magnets and can only be ordered at least 454 degrees Fahrenheit, so don't expect see spin memory on the shelf in a store on the computer at any time soon.

Christoph Boehme, associate professor at the University of Utah, says the thing more important than him and his team have done is show that it is possible to store information in the spin and quite easily read.

This is how they are y: firstly, they used a strong magnetic field to ensure that all of their atoms were pointing in the same direction. Then they measured which way the nucleus of an atom was spinning. Physicists speak of rotation clockwise or counterclockwise - hourly dispatching spins either up or down.

"This up and down can now represent information," explains Boehme. "A up means one and a lower mean zero."

Storage and handling of these zeros - bits in the computer language - is at the heart of the functioning of computers. Today, these zeros and those stored in electrically - charged positively or negatively. In the future, things could be different.

"Instead of electronics, people want to use the spins and build spintronics, and if you do, you should be able to store information, explains Boehme.".

"Many worlds".

They reported in the journal Science, they were able to store information in spins for nearly two minutes. But this was not the key realization.

"The main objective of this study was to show that you could read it with an electronic device," he explains. In other words, they could use electronic classical to read stored memory. Spintronics has certain advantages in the mail. In theory, spin memory should be faster and less power to run the electronic memory of take that.

Now, Boehme works in collaboration with classic bits of information. But because it works with the atoms, the Setup program can take you in the world of quantum information. Quantum physics is all about the functioning of atoms.

"Quantum information, I can have a little bit is zero and the other at the same time," explains John Morton, a physicist at the University of Oxford in England. This idea of being in two places at the same time is difficult to explain. Morton, a way of thinking is to imagine that there are several universe there.

"Whenever that quantum mechanics allows something to exist in two States at the same time, the universe split," says Morton, and you have a universe where it is one thing and a universe where it is in the other State. "You can along these lines think all computers parallel quantum computer in different worlds."

And as you can get these worlds to talk with another, then you have a very, very powerful computer.

The magic of quantum computing

Now, does feel bad if you don't quite get why computer quantum is such a desirable to have thing.

"It is not easy to explain,", says Stephen Lyon, Professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University. He and his colleagues are still trying to encourage students to enter the field of quantum computing.

"The approach we took to say, if you think that a number from one to four, with a quantum computer could know the number each time only a single estimate." Which do not just tell you how it works, but what say you there is something there type different from what most people are used, says Lyon. "" This is kind of magic ".

Of course, it is not really magic - is physical. Physical bizarre, but the physics.

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