Herbertsmithite

I don't know if it's jazz but I started reading about Herbertsmithite the other day and I'm pretty blown away. This article seems like the best easy source of info: http://dao.mit.edu/~wen/NSart-wen.html

It's thought to be a new state of matter, a string-net liquid, with electrons scattered like in a liquid, but dancing around each other in a Kagome lattice, which allows them to have fractional spin. And it might be the thing that lets us have quantum computers:

  Quote

Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon the building block for quantum computers.

 

...

 

The material would be a string-net liquid where ends of strings behaving like quasi-particles with fractional charge or spin. Physicists could manipulate quasi-particles (ie ends of strings) with electric or magnetic fields, braiding them around each other, encoding information in the number of times the strings twist and knot, says Freedman. A disturbance might knock the whole braid, but it won't change the number of twists protecting the information.

 

"The hardware itself would correct any errors," says Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.

IDM

shit name

Most IDM 2012

lol

in 2017 i'm gonna bump this thread from a brand new herbertsmithite computer, just wait

Although, this seems like cool stuff. It's pretty esoteric in the scheme of things.

So I wonder; do you think it's possible that the reason we're always hearing about these new scientific developments is because certain scientists have a bunch of aggressive PR people to draw attention to their inventions and thus drum up more funding for their seemingly expensive ventures?

Take the Hadron Collider; do most of us really give a shit about the Higgs Boson? I suspect that the people involved simply need to raise their profile in order to convince people that it's worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on.

  On 6/5/2011 at 6:23 AM, Boxus said:

lol

 

in 2017 i'm gonna bump this thread from a brand new herbertsmithite computer, just wait

yeah, but when you observe the thread, you'll obviously change the outcome

  On 6/5/2011 at 6:29 AM, Wall Bird said:

Although, this seems like cool stuff. It's pretty esoteric in the scheme of things.

 

So I wonder; do you think it's possible that the reason we're always hearing about these new scientific developments is because certain scientists have a bunch of aggressive PR people to draw attention to their inventions and thus drum up more funding for their seemingly expensive ventures?

 

Take the Hadron Collider; do most of us really give a shit about the Higgs Boson? I suspect that the people involved simply need to raise their profile in order to convince people that it's worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on.

I've wondered about this myself; will the Higgs Boson somehow do awesome things for the everyday person's life? Probably not. Interesting, but it really doesn't affect my (rather uneducated) life. Quantum computing? That definitely has a potential for practical application, so it could very well be worth spending millions of dollars on.