Georgetown University physics professor Jim Freericks was part of a team of scientists who recently built a crystal that could revolutionize the way computers operate. Scientists hope to someday use these crystals in supercomputers to perform quantum mechanic calculations.
What’s special about this crystal?
It can encode a memory that has [2 followed by 300 zeros] bits, which is more memory than one would have in all of the computers that have ever been built and probably ever will be built. … And its size is less than a millimeter square object.
And the downside?
On the one hand, it’s this remarkable, huge memory in a computer. But on the other hand the technology isn’t quite there yet where we can actually read and write to it the way we do with a hard drive. Eventually that’s something that will be looked at.
Could we ever see this technology in a conventional computer?
Not without some very significant technological developments. …. Even though the crystal itself is less than a millimeter, the machine that makes it fills a room. … But this is the way all these things start. The first thing you have to do is prove that something can work. And then afterwards, you ask, “Can this kind of technology be developed into something that could get into the consumer marketplace?” So we’re not there yet and we probably won’t be there for another many decades. But it is something that could potentially be around.
So what does this discovery mean for science?
It’s sort of the first step toward trying to get to a more functional computer that will really calculate things and then go beyond into things that are more like our conventional computers that you can program to do things you specifically want it to do. … It has now gotten into a big enough system that it is likely to show new discoveries that couldn’t be found any other way. That’s the big promise and breakthrough. – Jacob Demmitt
