NanoComputer

An international team of scientists has taken the next step in creating nanoscale machines by designing a multi-component molecular motor that can be moved clockwise and counterclockwise. It’s an essential step in creating nanoscale devices—quantum machines that operate on different laws of physics than classical machines—that scientists envision could be used for everything from powering quantum computers to sweeping away blood clots in arteries.
Although researchers can rotate or switch individual molecules on and off, the new study is the first to create a stand-alone molecular motor that has multiple parts, said Saw-Wai Hla, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy who led the study with french researcher Christian Joachim (CEMES/CNRS) working with A*Star in Singapore and in France Gwenael Rapenne of CEMES/CNRS.

This illustration shows the structure of the molecular motors.
In the study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, the scientists demonstrated that they could control the motion of the motor with energy generated by electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The motor is about 2 nanometers in length and 1 nanometer high and was constructed on a gold crystal surface.
See other recent research by a Dutch team in this nanocomputer.com post: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1015
Others researches: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=614 AND http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=421

Source: http://www.cemes.fr/
AND
http://www.ohio.edu/

What do fireflies, nanorods and Christmas lights have in common? Someday, consumers may be able to purchase multicolor strings of light that don’t need electricity or batteries to glow. Scientists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences found a new way to harness the natural light produced by fireflies (called bioluminescence) using nanoscience. Their breakthrough produces a system that is 20 to 30 times more efficient than those produced during previous experiments.
t’s all about the size and structure of the custom, quantum nanorods, which are produced in the laboratory by Mathew Maye, assistant professor of chemistry in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences; and Rabeka Alam, a chemistry Ph.D. candidate. Maye is also a member of the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute.

“Firefly light is one of nature’s best examples of bioluminescence,” Maye says. “The light is extremely bright and efficient. We’ve found a new way to harness biology for nonbiological applications by manipulating the interface between the biological and nonbiological components.”

Source: http://www.syr.edu/news/articles/2012/fireflies-06-12.html

The narrowest conducting wires in silicon ever produced are shown to have the same electric current arrying capability as copper. This means electrical interconnects in silicon can be shrunk to the atomic-scale without losing their functionality - Ohm's law holds true at the atomic-scale. The University of New South Wales  (UNSW) researchers will use these wires to address individual atoms – a key step in realising a scalable nanocomputer."Interconnecting wiring of this scale will be vital for the development of future atomic-scale electronic circuits," says the lead author of the study, Bent Weber, a PhD student in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at UNSW, in Sydney, Australia, supervised by Dr Michelle Simmmons.

Driven by the semiconductor industry, computer chip components continuously shrink in size allowing ever smaller and more powerful computers,” Simmons says. “Over the past 50 years this paradigm has established the microelectronics industry as one of the key drivers for global economic growth.  A major focus of the Centre of Excellence at UNSW is to push this technology to the next level to develop a silicon-based nanocomputer, where single atoms serve as the individual units of computation,” she says. “It will come down to the wire. We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms. But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognised that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale.”

Source: http://www.science.unsw.edu.au/news/

The wires were made by precisely placing chains of phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal, according to the study, which includes researchers from the University of Melbourne and Purdue University in the US.

Researchers from Bristol University in Great Britain, who have been developing quantum photonic chips for the past six years, are now working on scaling up the complexity of this device, and see this technology as the building block for the quantum computers of the future.“In order to build a quantum computer, we not only need to be able to control complex phenomena such as entanglement and mixture, but we need to be able to do this on a chip, in much the same way as the modern computers we have today,” says Professor Jeremy O'Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics. ”Our device enables this and we believe it is a major step forward towards optical quantum computing.”

“It isn’t ideal if your quantum computer can only perform a single specific task”, explains Peter Shadbolt, lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Nature Photonics.  “We would prefer to have a reconfigurable device which can perform a broad variety of tasks, much like our desktop PCs today – this reconfigurable ability is what we have now demonstrated. This device is approximately ten times more complex than previous experiments using this technology.”
Source: http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2011/8109.html