Are you ready for some technological rabbits to be pulled out of the ass of humanity? Because I am, and this is one area where it is going to happen. The future is cold. Ultra-cold.
Take this article, where they are using a BEC as superfluid ring, spun by a laser to use as a SQUID. This is atomtronics, and it is going to be some heavy shit.
You are going to see forms of matter never seen before. You are going to see manipulations of matter never before seen. And the applications? I can't even begin to guess.
I can't stress this enough. This is going to be some major shit.
ummm.., what are some of the priority necessary applications of BEC, and, why the 20 year proliferation timeline?
ReplyDeleteWhat current problems do BEC's threaten to solve?
The 20 year trend was a conservative estimate. I've said before that it took nearly one hundred years to go from the first production of a few grams of liquid helium to thousands of tons, and hundreds of millions of tons of liquid nitrogen and oxygen. Similar mass-production techniques will be developed for BECs and BCSs, and probably take about 20 years.
DeleteApplications? The unknown ones are the ones I'm excited about. I don't what those are. Direct manipulation of neutrons? Mass production of neutrinos? Cold fusion? (Real cold fusion?) 3-D printing? 4-D printing? Ansibles?
Known ones? Any quantum mechanical device you care to name, semiconductors, diodes, batteries, transistors, etc. The three benefits are superconductivity, superfluidity, and coherence. Nanofabrication? Quantum computers? Optical lattices? Spintronics? What do they use lasers for now? All those apps, but with matter lasers, stuff like that. My comparison is, again, the driver of the 20th century: refrigeration. Where once liquified gases were a lab curiosity, now are used from chilled superconducting magnets, fabrication ranging from steel production to chip production. Coherent matter waves and
hmmm..., clearly a neat area for speculative research, but there don't appear to be any advanced theoretical applications on the back burner. Take for example, the business of acoustic refrigeration, and/or magnetic resonance propulsion, sonoluminesence, etc..., phenomena known and studied for 30-40 years, for which there are definite applications, like friction suppression and thrust in hypersonic craft (magnetic resonance propulsion)
ReplyDeleteI think the phenomenon itself is so new, and the possibilities so broad, that applications will probably be forthcoming on a much longer timeline.
What by the way is 4-D printing?
Technically, it's still 3-D but with dynamic moving parts.
Deletehttp://www.macuser.co.uk/4685-4d-printer-liquidmetal-origami