A Cooler Computer

As computers continue to shrink, the energy required per computation decreases. But in the next few decades, digital devices will hit the theoretical limit for the minimum energy required for a single operation. Now Jan Klaers of the University of Twente in the Netherlands proposes a way to get around this limit using so-called squeezed thermal states. These states allow the computer to operate at an effectively lower temperature, where operations expend less energy. Klaers suggests that energy savings could be achieved with current computer technology by taking advantage of squeezed states that arise naturally in the thermal environment of a computer.