Monday, December 7, 2009

Single-Atom Transistor Discovered

Science Daily reports that a research team has succeeded in building a working transistor "whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon". This research is working towards enabling quantum computing, with the idea of utilizing the spin degree of freedom of an electron of the phosphorus donor as a quantum bit, a qubit.


The researchers were able to observe in their experiments spin up and down states for a single phosphorus donor for the first time. This is a crucial step towards the control of these states, that is, the realization of a qubit.

A particularly interesting thought mentioned in the story that isn't heard often outside of the scientific community is that "the rapid development of computers, which created the present information society, has been mainly based on the reduction of the size of transistors." In other words, much of our way of life in the 21st century is substantially due to the historical and ongoing miniaturization of transistors.


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