You are sitting in the long shade of a small
tree at Pine Hill Lakes Park while Carol is on her morning walk. Routine is
returning to the Hammond-Orndorff household. Blue sky and well watered green foliage
in the surrounds. – Amorella
0812
hours. First, I need to set the work help 2.2 doc in a time sequence order.
1038
hours. I have completed Pouch 2.2.
By all means, add and then post. – Amorella
Add and post, orndorff. – Amorella
***
Diplomatic Pouch 2.2 ©2014 rho
Blake
asks Friendly, “Do you shave your legs?”
“We
marsupial women have no hair to shave. As I said, we alter our genetic
structure so there is no body hair, that is, other than what you call pubic or
belly-pouch hair. Our philosophers or clerics as you might call them, both
female and male, have their genes altered so they have no hair at all, head to
toe.”
“Why
do they do that, I mean, they wear clothes don’t they? People wouldn’t know,”
continued Blake.
“They
do wear clothes, but without hair they feel closer to angels.”
“Really?”
replied Justin.
“Angels
may not be the right word in English. Angelic-like force is perhaps better,”
comments Friendly. “Clerics feel closer to Godofamily because animals have
hair, so without hair some people feel less animal and more spiritual.
Justin
paused a moment thinking of the eighties documentary The Power of Myth with Bill Moyer’s interview with the mythologist
Joseph Campbell on comparative cultural mythology. Here, we think of angels
with bright swords and these people think of angels being hairless.
“I
have been meaning to ask,” says Blake, “What is in snack we are nibbling on? I
like the crunch.
Friendly smiles confidently saying,
“What look like nuts are a sweet beetle that has a cinnamon-like taste. It is a
flavoring my fifteenth generation grandmother concocted. It has been handed
down ever since.”
Pyl’s eyes got big and her face
jutted, “Huh? They are beetles?”
“Yes, and very sweet. Most
everyone loves them.”
“You need to acclimate to our
foods,” adds Hartolite with a grin.
“Are all these different nuts in
the bowl really beetles?’ asks Justin.
“No. Some are nuts.
Beetlewingsandtreenuts are a great combination. We eat them like potato chips.
Ours are healthier though because they are genetically induced and farm raised
proteins.”
“Which?” laughs Pyl, “The beetles
or the nuts?”
“Both,” replies Friendly, “glad
you like them.”
Beetle wings that appear and taste
similar to Pringle’s potato chips, optimizes Justin, I would never know, but
then I don’t really know what our foods are really composed of. These are
proteins, that’s better than fat.
“I think you are joking,” says
Blake. “How do we know anyway? We have to take your word for it. Besides, the
nuts taste like walnuts but look like peanuts. If it tastes like a walnut
that’s enough to satisfy me.”
“Why would you say that, Blake,”
responds Pyl. “You can’t earthanize everything that is foreign?”
“Why not? I relate to the Earth. I
am the Earth.”
“We do the same, Pyl,” replies
Friendly. “Everyone adjusts to a foreign culture in herorhis own way.
“Their own way, Friendly,” notes
Blake.
“Thank you, my good Dr. Blake,”
smiles Friendly in return. “It’s okay, Pyl. I asked him to make verbal
corrections where he sees them. Languages can be very tricky.”
“And deceptive,” adds Justin who
then realizes his comment might be misconstrued. He brightens, “Good morning,
Yermey!”
“Morning all.” Yermey notes the
smiles as he grabs a handful of snack. “I have been thinking.”
Being helpfully, Pyl asks, “What
about?”
He sits next to Pyl in his usual
position at the table, “Your peoples’ sense of freedom and dignity. Why do you
place freedom before dignity? It would seem dignity would come first?”
“It is a phrase,” says Blake.
“Without freedom there is no dignity. That’s the meaning.”
“No, this is not true, Blake.
There is a wonderful photograph of a nearly starved human dignity sitting naked
in a simple chair. It was taken shortly after the Allies liberated a Nazi
concentration camp. He sits tall and regal-like with his left leg crossed
closed in the European fashion.”
“So, he has his freedom restored
and he sits in the human dignity he can muster,” snaps Blake. “There is no
dignity in being a slave.”
“We are all slaves to something
Blake,” counters Justin.
“When we are dead we are slaves to
nothing,” vents Blake.
“Perhaps being hairless is a form
of dignity,” suggests Hartolite.
“Don’t tell Samson that?” humors
Blake; he mumbles, “or Delilah either.”
“What I was thinking about,”
injects Yermey, “is that you people live in groups as we do. You have your city
states, as it were, and your smaller groups, being close friends and family
groups. You have branches of government but they are not living branches.
Freedom and dignity are the sap in branches. Our society is based on roots of
dignity that allows freedom to grow into leaves and flowers. The roots are in
spiritual dignity first – that is, human spiritual dignity. We would not have
come here otherwise. You people don’t say what you mean.”
“No,”
replies Blake with a snort, “We people mean what we say.”
***
Before lunch. You found an interesting
article on pencils and quantum computers that strikes your fancy because of the
obvious juxtaposition. And, you consider it a form of natural humor in the universe
as it were – a little joke supplied by the human-like spirit wherever it may
reside. – Amorella
1311 hours. It is – I like to think we
and other species too provide a humor – intended I would hope, but if not, a
slice of quantum fortune that makes the ‘place’ more delightful that makes the
‘place’ more delightful to observing eyes.
** **
Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics
From pencil marks to quantum computers
Introducing graphene
One of the hottest materials in condensed matter research today is
graphene.
Graphene had an unlikely start: it began with researchers messing
around with pencil marks on paper. Pencil "lead" is actually made of
graphite, which is a soft crystal lattice made of nothing but carbon atoms.
When pencils deposit that graphite on paper, the lattice is laid down in thin
sheets. By pulling that lattice apart into thinner sheets – originally using
Scotch tape – researchers discovered that they could make flakes of crystal
just one atom thick.
The name for this atom-scale chicken wire is graphene. Those folks
with the Scotch tape, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, won the 2010 Nobel
Prize for discovering it. "As a material, it is completely new – not only
the thinnest ever but also the strongest," wrote the Nobel committee.
"As a conductor of electricity, it performs as well as copper. As a
conductor of heat, it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost
completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas
atom, can pass through it."
Developing a theoretical model of graphene
Graphene is not just a practical wonder – it's also a wonderland for
theorists. Confined to the two-dimensional surface of the graphene, the
electrons behave strangely. All kinds of new phenomena can be seen, and new
ideas can be tested. Testing new ideas in graphene is exactly what Perimeter
researchers Zlatko Papić and Dmitry (Dima) Abanin set out to do.
"Dima and I started working on graphene a very long time
ago," says Papić. "We first met in 2009 at a conference in Sweden. I
was a grad student and Dima was in the first year of his postdoc, I
think."
The two young scientists got to talking about what new physics they
might be able to observe in the strange new material when it is exposed to a
strong magnetic field.
"We decided we wanted to model the material," says Papić.
They've been working on their theoretical model of graphene, on and off, ever
since. The two are now both at Perimeter Institute, where Papić is a
postdoctoral researcher and Abanin is a faculty member. They are both
cross-appointed with the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the
University of Waterloo.
In January 2014, they published a paper in Physical Review Letters
(PRL) presenting new ideas about how to induce a strange but interesting state
in graphene – one where it appears as if particles inside it have a fraction of
an electron's charge.
It's called the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), and it's head
turning. Like the speed of light or Planck's constant, the charge of the
electron is a fixed point in the disorienting quantum universe.
Every system in the universe carries whole multiples of a single
electron's charge. When the FQHE was first discovered in the 1980s, condensed
matter physicists quickly worked out that the fractionally charged
"particles" inside their semiconductors were actually quasiparticles –
that is, emergent collective behaviours of the system that imitate particles.
Graphene is an ideal material in which to study the FQHE.
"Because it's just one atom thick, you have direct access to the
surface," says Papić. "In semiconductors, where FQHE was first
observed, the gas of electrons that create this effect are buried deep inside
the material. They're hard to access and manipulate. But with graphene you can
imagine manipulating these states much more easily."
In the January paper, Abanin and Papić reported novel types of FQHE
states that could arise in bilayer graphene – that is, in two sheets of
graphene laid one on top of another – when it is placed in a strong
perpendicular magnetic field. In an earlier work from 2012, they argued that
applying an electric field across the surface of bilayer graphene could offer a
unique experimental knob to induce transitions between FQHE states. Combining
the two effects, they argued, would be an ideal way to look at special FQHE
states and the transitions between them.
Experimental tests
Two experimental groups – one in Geneva, involving Abanin, and one at
Columbia, involving both Abanin and Papić – have since put the electric field +
magnetic field method to good use. The paper by the Columbia group appears in
the July 4 issue of Science . A third group, led by Amir Yacoby of
Harvard, is doing closely related work.
"We often work hand in hand with experimentalists," says
Papić. "One of the reasons I like condensed matter is that often even the
most sophisticated, cutting-edge theory stands a good chance of being quickly
checked with experiment."
Inside both the magnetic and electric field, the electrical resistance
of the graphene demonstrates the strange behaviour characteristic of the FQHE.
Instead of resistance that varies in a smooth curve with voltage, resistance
jumps suddenly from one level to another, and then plateaus – a kind of
staircase of resistance. Each stair step is a different state of matter,
defined by the complex quantum tangle of charges, spins, and other properties
inside the graphene.
"The number of states is quite rich," says Papić.
"We're very interested in bilayer graphene because of the number of states
we are detecting and because we have these mechanisms – like tuning the
electric field – to study how these states are interrelated, and what happens
when the material changes from one state to another."
For the moment, researchers are particularly interested in the stair
steps whose "height" is described by a fraction with an even
denominator. That's because the quasiparticles in that state are expected to
have an unusual property.
There are two kinds of particles in our three-dimensional world:
fermions (such as electrons), where two identical particles can't occupy one
state, and bosons (such as photons), where two identical particles actually
want to occupy one state. In three dimensions, fermions are fermions and bosons
are bosons, and never the twain shall meet.
But a sheet of graphene doesn't have three dimensions – it has two.
It's effectively a tiny two-dimensional universe, and in that universe, new
phenomena can occur. For one thing, fermions and bosons can meet halfway –
becoming anyons, which can be anywhere in between fermions and bosons. The
quasiparticles in these special stair-step states are expected to be anyons.
In particular, the researchers are hoping these quasiparticles will be
non-Abelian anyons, as their theory indicates they should be. That would be
exciting because non-Abelian anyons can be used in the making of qubits.
Graphene qubits?
Qubits are to quantum computers what bits are to ordinary computers:
both a basic unit of information and the basic piece of equipment that stores
that information. Because of their quantum complexity, qubits are more powerful
than ordinary bits and their power grows exponentially as more of them are
added. A quantum computer of only a hundred qubits can tackle certain problems
beyond the reach of even the best non-quantum supercomputers. Or, it could, if
someone could find a way to build stable qubits.
The drive to make qubits is part of the reason why graphene is a hot
research area in general, and why even-denominator FQHE states – with their
special anyons– are sought after in particular. "A state with some number
of these anyons can be used to represent a qubit," says Papić. "Our
theory says they should be there and the experiments seem to bear that out –
certainly the even-denominator FQHE states seem to be there, at least according
to the Geneva experiments."
That's still a step away from experimental proof that those even-denominator
stair-step states actually contain non-Abelian anyons. More work remains, but
Papić is optimistic: "It might be easier to prove in graphene than it
would be in semiconductors. Everything is happening right at the surface."
It's still early, but it looks as if bilayer graphene may be the magic
material that allows this kind of qubit to be built. That would be a major mark
on the unlikely line between pencil lead and quantum computers.
http://wwwDOTeurekalertDOTorg/pub_releases/2014-07/pift-fpm070314DOTphp
From – EurekAlert!
** **
Post. -
Amorella
Carol is
speaking of watching the fireworks at King’s Island; it is about time to go, orndorff.
Post. - Amorella
Late mid-afternoon. Carol is in the basement
cleaning out boxes for an eventual move to a one story home. You have begun
working on cleaning up Chapter Seventeen of GMG.One.
1636
hours. I feel like this ‘cleaning the basement’ is the beginning of cleaning up
our lives for their eventual conclusion. I don’t mind and should do my own
part. I remember Mom doing this with family photographs and such. We acquire a
lot of stuff in a lifetime, none of which we can take with us. Kim will no
doubt want a few possessions but over all there is not much of sentimental
worth let alone material. Used furniture doesn’t go for much. Cars can be sold.
We have a couple of cats Kim would take in and some paintings and knickknacks
she could find use for. Her baby bed was also Carol’s but because of the
railings it is considered unsafe in present time. I can’t see saving much of
it. I have a perfectly good Sony receiver and a good subwoofer and speakers to
go with it but the receiver is from the early seventies and the speakers,
though redone digital are out of the eighties and no longer considered
adequate. We have two old desks, again, both old and worth next to nothing. As
Grandma Schick (who worked in an ammunition factory during WWII) used to say
about particular people or things, “They aren’t worth the powder it would take
to blow them up.”
You do have most of your family genealogy in
the basement; you ought to find a safe place to store it. Someone in the family
may want it eventually. – Amorella
1650
hours. That’s true. I need to go through that. Otherwise, all those old writing
files can go out. They are of no use to anyone and not even of much use to me
anymore.
2123
hours. I completed the final editing chapter seventeen working backwards.
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