"There's plenty of room at the bottom"

Richard Feynman used this term in a lecture back in 1959, when he challenged the physics and engineering community to get going on the field of nanotechnology. There's a certain irony in the talk, as Feynman himself - and everyone in the room - was a product of a well-tested-and-proven four-billion-year-old version of nanotech we call biology.

Some twenty-seven years later, Eric Drexler again lead the cheer for nanotechnology in a book called "Engines of Creation". How much the field had advanced - and it had, at least, say, in the realm of miniaturized electronics upon silicon substrates - since Feynman's talk was considerable, but still not nearly enough. Many of Drexler's predictions are not even close to coming to pass. Apparently, what Nature hath wrought through dumb luck is a little bit harder than imagined.

In any case, what is interesting about Feynman's lecture is the opening line where he references the quest for the seemingly unlimited limits of cold:

"I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down".

Soon, this will all be on a chip

Of course, Feynman exaggerated. We know there is such a thing as Absolute Zero, a limit that can never be reached, but the asymptotic approach is indeed bottomless. And the closer you get to absolute zero, the more interesting things get. I hate to bore people with this, but the more I read and absorb upon the subject of ultra-low temperature physics, the more my gut tells me there is something absolutely unexpected and technologically disruptive to be found there. There will be some type of remarkable breakthrough in our near future, perhaps not equivalent to nuclear energy or the commodification of information, but certainly up there with air conditioning or the Internet. What it is, I cannot say. Maybe something to do with the words "quantum". Something to do with atom chips, and matter lasers, and Bose-Einstein condensates, and complex optics, and the protean shapes of photons, and perhaps even sub-atomic manipulations.

Or perhaps it will be a change of worldview more than anything else, something along the lines of the resurgence of curiosity and inquiry that occurred back in the 17th century (something which had been generally lacking in Western society for nearly 2,000 years).

Take, for example, the recent work at the Vienna University of Technology (and is there something in the water at Vienna?), which reveals a very interesting intermediate state between chaos and order.

Studies of matter at ultra-low temperatures shows that the process towards thermal equilibrium is much more complex than thought. It appears there is a regime of stable dis-equilibrium that can occur in between. Indeed, couple this with studies of the networking of networks, and it looks as if the concepts of chaos and order need to be tossed out completely. Even the idea of classical equilibrium may be nothing more than a concept - something that does not actually occur in the real world. If so, it may change how we thing about things, from climate change to markets. It may be that there is no such thing as a status quo, and thus, attempting to maintain it may be a fool's errand.

Well, nothing new there, really. Expect the unexpected and all that. But still, I got a weird feeling going on from all this shit...

Atomtronics

I've been busy assembling the weekend sculptor's big abstract geometric aluminum sculpture for installation this Thursday. I'm not exactly beat down by the work, but these 9-12 hour days for the past eleven days have taken their toll. I've got more than my fair share of bruises, cuts, scrapes, abrasions, and burns on me. Not to mention sore muscles. And I recently acquired a close to  world record 2nd degree burn blister on my right index finger, where I had to hold a bracket while it got welded in place, and it set my leather welding glove on fire, but I had to keep holding on till the job was done. I then threw the burning glove to the floor, but too late, I got myself a burn. I need to figure out a clamp that works on nonmagnetic metals. An articulated clamp. I actually, I did, but I can't say more in case it is patentable (which means I do a google search).

So, I've been behind on my science news reading (which is the only news that is news).

I'm starting to suspect that my prediction regarding ultracold things may have some legs to it. The topic of atomtronics is starting to heat up. Plus, some scientists in Germany are starting to figure out how to cool down large masses to near absolute zero. So, the industrial mass production of supercold shit seems to be inevitable. I look forward to the cool things that will come out of left field as a result of this.

Other news. I know wireless power has been a dream going back to Tesla. I also know that small devices can be powered via radio waves. No they have figured out how to cheaply mass produce devices that are powered by radio waves. These funny little patches are conceived to be used for information on things like price tags, logos, and signage similar to the way QR codes are used.

But, as I surmised with QR code abuse, I can't help but think that these rectenna devices could be used to load malware on your mobile. And, given that they are cheap to produce, and fairly innocuous and easily hidden, what's to stop people from leaving them everywhere? No worse than what occurs now with mobiles, I suppose, but, a little computer patch on a dumpster or a bulletin board sign ready to upload a virus to your mobile makes life just a little more interesting for the plugged-in.

Me? I'll stick to my stone knives and bearskins.

Back to work!

Industrial Nucleonics Revisited

Praxair: courtesy PJ Singer @ Citydata

On a drive back home from Chicago on I90/94, I will pass the Praxair facility, where they have three air separation towers. (During the holidays, they put christmas lights on top to make them look like candles, aww). The towers use a cryogenic air separation technique that goes back to Carl Von Linde's laboratory setup in 1895. With the compression, refrigeration, and liqufaction of air (originally for pure scientific purposes, and based upon refrigeration techniques developed as early as 1853 by J.P. Joule and W. Thompson) Linde quickly realized he could adapt the technique for industrial purposes to produce separate bottled gases of exceptional purity. Not surprisingly, the output is reflective of our source atmosphere, with nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%) the largest products, followed by carbon dioxide, argon, neon, krypton, xenon, etc.

Fast forward to 1911, Heike Kammerlingh Onnes, the brilliant Dutch physicist, has recently produced liquid helium in his veritable factory of a physics laboratory at Leiden. When he dropped mercury into the liquid helium, he noticed that the mercury lost all resistance to electricity at the frigid temperature of 4 degrees Kelvin (-452F). The mercury sample had become a superconductor. Over time, many other materials - at much higher but still very cold temperatures - were found to become superconductors.

Various explanations were proposed, but in 1957, three physicists, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, Robert  Schrieffer, developed what is now called the BCS theory of superconductivity, in which it was explained that electrons form Cooper pairs in an interaction with the cooled media - basically, within the lattice of atoms they are paired up by vibrations called phonons. That's the standard explanation for zero electrical resistance, but what exactly are Cooper pairs and are fermions (particles subject to the exclusion principle) the only beneficiaries of this phenomenon?

The other curious beast of the supercold realm is the BEC: the Bose-Einstein Condensate. BECs are dilute collections of atoms that, when cooled down, start to behave as if they have lost their individual identities: as if the entire collection of atoms is one big atom.

The rather naive observation, that these regimes seemed to share a superficial commonality, made me wonder, if electron can form Cooper pairs in a BCS system, why not other particles? More specifically, could free neutrons form Cooper pairs in a BEC? Neutrons when confined in a nucleus are stable, but free neutrons, outside of the stabilizing field of the nucleus, for whatever reason, tend to beta decay into protons after about fifteen minutes.  Why? I don't know. Would coupling of neutrons as a Cooper pair increase their decay lifetime? I don't know, but a few nights ago, it prompted this comment some few essays back:

"It occurred to me the other night (and I wasn't even stoned) that one should be able to get neutrons to pair up like Cooper pair electrons in a superchilled environment, and get a BCS-BEC (Bardeen Cooper Schrieffer) - (Bose Einstein Condensate) crossover, kind of a paired superconducting neutrons, a lased di-neutron beam, and sure enough, you can do it. Dig that!"

Admittedly, it all now sounds rather geeky and masturbate-y. Nevertheless, it turns out I'm not the only one that has asked this question (although of course, the lased di-neutron beam portion would be politely snickered at). But it's nice top know my hunches pan out more often than not.

So, there are a number of questions I ask. What exactly is a Cooper pair?

Neutrons are electrically neutral, which a neutron beam cannot be manipulated as proton and electron beams can. But neutrons do have a magnetic moment and spin, which means they can be manipulated in extremely strong magnetic fields, in the realm of 2-3 Tesla (the Earth's magnetic field strength is 31-58 microTeslas, depending where on Earth you measure). Can a thermally cooled, Cooper paired neutron beam be more easily manipulated?

These attributes - superconductivity, superfluidity - seen at near-Absolute zero temperatures, are also seen at extremely high temperatures: namely, the quark-gluon plasmas at the beginning of the Universe, and also re-created in places like the RHIC in Brookhaven. Is there a connection? How to exploit it if  so?

One hundred years after the first successful production of liquid helium (a mere 60 cubic centimeters first produced in 1908), some 193 million cubic meters are now produced. 96 metric tons of liquid helium is used to cool the superconducting magnets in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

I've got to wonder, how long before Bose-Einstein Condensates are mass produced and used on a comparable industrial scale? Given current trends, my $1 bet is 2030 at the latest. And then? And then what?

Although neon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, argon is 500 times more abundant in our atmosphere. This is so because neon is lighter than argon, and most probably escaped Earth's atmosphere a very long time ago. Argon is important in industry as a welding gas. I have a hunch though, that neon may turn out to be much more important in the long run.

And then? Then what? Well, if I knew what the industrial applications of BECs beyond current applications were, I wouldn't tell you. I'd tell a tech investor. But my guess is, the obvious applications (nano-fabrication/ultra-precise measurements/quantum information and computing) will not be the real true industrial application. My guess is it will be something that, if we now, would make us shit our pants in astonishment.

But my guess is, to borrow from the movie "The Graduate", the word of the future will be "phonons".