NY Times: “Physicists create single-atom transistor, a crucial step toward a nanocomputer”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0198
Alone among the East Coast national newspapers, the 20 February New York Times highlights the 19 February Nature Nanotechnology news that, as the Times summarizes it, “Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.”
John Markoff of the Times explains:
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today’s silicon-based machines.
In contrast to conventional computers that are based on transistors with distinct “on” and “off” or “1" and “0" states, quantum computers are built from devices called qubits that exploit the quirky properties of quantum mechanics. Unlike a transistor, a qubit can represent a multiplicity of values simultaneously.
That might make it possible to factor large numbers more quickly than with conventional machines, thereby undermining modern data-scrambling systems that are the basis of electronic commerce and data privacy. Quantum computers might also make it possible to simulate molecular structures with great speed, an advance that holds promise for designing new drugs and other materials.
Later Markoff stipulates that “whether quantum computing will ever be harnessed for useful tasks remains uncertain” and says the following:
Demonstrations of single-atom transistors date from 2002, but the researchers . . . said they had made advances on two fronts: in the precision with which they placed the Lilliputian switch; and in the use of industry-standard techniques to build the circuitry, making it possible to read and write information from the tiniest conceivable switch.
Markoff quotes an IBM physicist, Andreas Heinrich: “Their approach is extremely powerful.” And he quotes Gerhard Klimeck, the engineer who leads Purdue’s part of the project: “The technologies for classical computing can survive to the atomic scale.” Markoff also recalls that in the 1950s, “the physicist Richard P. Feynman predicted a world where there would be ‘plenty of room at the bottom,’ opening new vistas into engineering disciplines that would use individual atoms as bricks and mortar in fields as diverse as computing and biology.”
The researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope. Additional perspective on their work appears in the Nature Nanotechnology “News and Views” essay “ Nanoelectronics: Transistors arrive at the atomic limit ,” which ends with this:
The atom-by-atom fabrication technique . . . fulfills a long-standing need for a method that is capable of atomic-scale device fabrication in silicon. And although the technique is not directly applicable on an industrial scale, it does bring the development of truly atomistic electronics—and the possibilities they offer—into the experimental realm.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.