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Super-computers with Nanostructures under research
9 January 2006
Scientists at University of Cambridge hope to create new generation of super-computers.
Cambridge wins £4.4 m grant to research nanostructures
Research promising revolution in speed and security of information technology is awarded with £4.4m by the Government's main science funding agency, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPRSC). According to the news release by University of Cambridge, Research aims to develop supercomputer based on nanostructures also expected to discover new laws of physics.
The new supercomputers will work on the principle alien to current engineering community. Team of scientists from Universities department of physics at cavendish laboratory wants to develop a new generation of tiny semiconductors. This semiconductors will be developed on a nanoscale; probably smallest electronic structures ever. These Nanostructures will be the main component computer chips enabling communication of information faster than ever before. These Supercomputers based on Nanostructures will be called 'Quantum Computers'.
Professor Sir Michael Pepper, who is Principal Investigator on the four-year project and head of the Semiconductor Physics Group at the Cavendish, said: "We are not talking about speeding up reactions by a factor of two or three, but by a factor of billions! Currently computing operations happen in sequence. With the new technology they will happen in parallel."
Other investigators in the team at the Cavendish Laboratory include Professor David Ritchie, Professor Charles Smith, Dr Crispin Barnes, Dr Chris Ford, Dr Geb Jones, and Dr Kalaricad Thomas, who are joined by Professor Michael Kelly in the Department of Engineering.
"The main applications for the new quantum computers will initially be enormous databases and security," said Professor Pepper. "Beyond that, quantum technology will impact on everyone's lives, but we are not yet sure how. This work will bring about a fusion of technology with the most fundamental theory of nature - the laws of quantum mechanics. We anticipate finding new types of behaviour in physics when dimensions become extremely small.
"It is hard to say just what the full implications of this work are, in a way that we did not understand the full impact of computers when scientists in Cambridge first worked on them in the 1940s. I hope that the research will contribute to new industries yet to be born."
Original News can be found here
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