[p2p-research] A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: A Single Molecule Computes
Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC via Popular Science - New
Technology, Science News, The Future Now by Clay Dillow on 5/5/10
Computing with Iodine
A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has
yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform
a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional
computer.

A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform -- a
common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among
other things -- performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very
well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame.

Using quantum interference - the vibrations of the atoms themselves -
the team was able to run the complete discrete Fourier transform
extremely quickly by encoding the inputs into an optically tailored
vibrational wave packet which is then run through an excited iodine
molecule whose atomic elements are oscillating at known intervals and
picked up by a receiver on the other side. The entire process takes
just a few tens of femtoseconds (that's a quadrillionth of a second).
So we're not just talking faster data flow or processing here; these
are speeds that are physically impossible on any kind of conventional
electronic device.

But don't trade in your conventional computing power just yet. Like
other quantum information platforms, molecular computing is in its
infancy; we understand some of its mechanisms, but it's difficult to
execute and there are still a lot of unknowns. Further, researchers
aren't quite sure how they could integrate such technology into
something that works the way we're used to our computers working.

Still, the very fact that researchers were able to pull off a
calculation at such speeds shows just how big of an impact molecular
calculations could have on the science of computing.

[Science Daily]

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