Magnetic 'superatoms' promise quantum computing

In the quatum computing field , this is a big discovery that stablity and magnetism of an atom are NOT mutually exclusive. You can have a stable atom with shared electrons, that also exhibits it's own magnetism.

Quantum computing is going to revolutionise computers and I hope they will come up in our life time.

New "superatoms" – clusters of atoms that share electrons and can mimic the behaviour of other elements – have been devised with magnetic properties for the first time. The breakthrough provides a way to design novel nano-scale building blocks with controllable magnetic properties that could be used to make faster computer processors and denser memory storage.

Magnetism is caused by the spin of an atom's electrons, which are arranged in shells, or orbitals, around the atom's nucleus. Their net spin determines the strength of the atom's magnetic "moment", and because they tend to occur in pairs that cancel each other out, it is the atom's unpaired electrons that contribute to its magnetic moment.

Khanna's magnetic superatoms are only calculations at this point, but he has funding from the Department of Energy to make them a reality. He hopes the clusters can be used to give researchers a new dimension of control in designing new materials.

For example, stable magnetic clusters could one day be used in new "spintronic" devices, which compute or store information using magnetic moments rather than simply electrical charge. Encoding data in this way means the devices can be far smaller than those used to make conventional electronic components, potentially providing an overall boost in computing power.

Source: www.newscientist.com...

Black hole for real.
Quantum computing. wtF. Maybe it (tech singularity) is not supposed to happen if we can't bring Paradise to Earth even if we a technologically (science/math) spiritually already able to do it.
We are about to be cast out, don't even know what that means.

reply to post by Animaly

Quantum computing. wtF. Maybe it (tech singularity) is not supposed to happen if we can't bring Paradise to Earth even if we a technologically (science/math) spiritually already able to do it.

How do you think we can bring paradise on earth? And I dont think quantum computing is the end, it is defintely not tech singularity.

Originally posted by Animaly
Black hole

for real.
Quantum computing. wtF. Maybe it (tech singularity) is not supposed to happen if we can't bring Paradise to Earth even if we a technologically (science/math) spiritually already able to do it.
We are about to be cast out, don't even know what that means.

Obviously you have no idea how a Quantum computer works! Perhaps you should read up on the subject before you make a comment like that.

Knowledge is power after all!

To the OP: S&F

[edit on 16-7-2009 by DaMod]

Very cool post sunny. This will definitely push our singularity threshold back another few years. As i understand it we were already nearing the point where we couldn't make much smaller microprocessors than we currently are. Get this tech out there.