Computers Bright as Diamonds

The key to the next generation of supercomputers might just be diamonds with small nitrogen-filled holes in them, according to some California scientists.

Who ever said that “diamonds are a girl's best friend” did not know any computer specialist, the proof being the latest invention of researchers from Scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

They have used commercially available technology and have made nitrogen-vacancy diamonds that can store millions of times more information that the current silicon-based systems, and also process it much faster.

Adding quantum mechanics on a supercomputer is not really what Mother Nature would do, so scientists had to find a way of being extremely precise when implanting precisely patterned arrayed nitrogen holes inside sheets of diamond.

For creating such a complex alignment, they used an ion beam to remove two carbon atoms and replaced them with a nitrogen atom, reports Discovery News.

The result was that in a space of a second, they managed to inject about 4000 glowing nitrogen atoms and in one minute, they already had patterned a few centimeters of flat diamond.

No one has established for certain how diamond-based computers would be used, but scientists should be able to design more efficient silicon-based computers, or used them for developing drugs and cryptography.

Nitrogen being inside diamonds is no novelty, as it has always been this way, even since diamonds first formed, and this is why some diamonds have a yellow shade.

In quantum mechanics, researchers used these natural nitrogen-infused diamonds to study several aspects, like David Awschalom, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters says: “we've used well-known techniques to create atomic-size defects in otherwise perfect diamonds.”

This new technique is apparently quite simple: ”you can buy it online, send it to another company for the patterning, and then explore it yourself,” explains Awschalom, whose students did exactly that to demonstrate the simplicity of the technology.