There’s nothing like a game of catch — tossing a baseball back and forth promises some old-fashioned, low-effort fun. But it’s a difficult endeavor when it involves frosty atoms and lasers.
In a new study, scientists set up a tiny game of baseball in which laser beams tossed and caught atoms. This marked the first example of laser-powered “optical traps” — which work somewhat like a Star Wars lightsaber to manipulate tiny objects — successfully throwing and receiving atoms, according to a study recently published in the journal Optica. The speedball atoms traveled 4.2 micrometers as fast as 65 centimeters per second, researchers found. In comparison, the fastest spider can crawl up to around 50 centimeters per second.
This new mechanism could eventually help power quantum computers, which have the potential to run models thousands of times quicker than today’s machines — possibly paving the way for feats like new life-saving drugs, smarter AI, and enhanced cybersecurity.
More specifically, the optical traps could quickly rearrange qubits, the quantum mechanics version of the bits found in regular computers that contain chunks of information.
“There are possibilities for moving qubits to enable more efficient and faster quantum computing,” Jaewook Ahn, a physicist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and co-author of the new study, tells Inverse.
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