Thursday, March 15, 2007

Thinking inside the box: Trapped light spurs quantum computing - Yahoo! News

Thinking inside the box: Trapped light spurs quantum computing - Yahoo! News: "Photons are arguably the ultimate existential particle in physics. By switching on a light bulb, you release a million billion photons every second.

But as soon as you see a photon, it dies, for its contact with the retina expends the energy that made it exist.

'Photons are easy to detect. You do it yourself, every second for instance when you are looking at a computer screen,' Jean-Michel Raimond of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who is one of the innovators, told AFP.

'But you do this only once. It's post-mortem analysis. We, though, can now analyse it in real time, while the photon is still alive.'"

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