The UCLA team succeeded in flipping a single electron spin upside down in an ordinary commercial transistor chip, and detected that the current changes when the electron flips.

Scientists had manipulated millions of electron spins in a transistor before. "We have gone from millions to just one." "We have measured a single electron spin in an ordinary transistor; this means that conventional silicon technology is adaptable enough, and powerful enough, to accommodate the future electronic requirements of new technologies like quantum computing, which will depend on spin."

"We've manipulated one spin," Yablonovitch said. "A year from now, manipulating a single spin might be all in a day's work, and in 10 years, perhaps it will have a commercial role."

Jiang and Xiao succeeded in working with the transistor at low temperatures: minus more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Jiang and Yablonovitch have ideas for operating in the future at room temperature, which would be much more practical commercially.

Jiang and Xiao's method for controlling the electron was to shine a microwave radio frequency to flip the spin of the electron. Two other research groups, one from IBM and one from the Netherlands, also are reporting the detection of a single electron spin. The groups used different methods to measure a single electron spin.

How powerful can quantum computing be? "With 100 transistors, each containing one of these electrons, you could have the implicit information storage that corresponds to all of the hard disks made in the world this year, multiplied by the number of years the universe has been around," Yablonovitch said. "And why stop with 100 transistors?" A next step is to demonstrate the "entanglement" of two spins, where the orientation of one electron determines the orientation of the other. >from *Quantum Computing, Secure Communications Closer to Reality; UCLA Scientists Control a Single Electron's Spin*. july 23, 2004

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imago
> flip electron spin in silicon for quantum world !