A New Spin On Atomic Logic

在过去的十年里，我们在单原子和单分子水平上获取和处理信息的能力取得了惊人的进步。扫描隧道显微镜（STM）和它稍微年轻一点的兄弟——原子力显微镜（AFM），现在都能探测、定位单个原子，并在本质上，通过利用各种各样的物理化学过程和性质的控制，精确到单个化学键的极限，对单个原子进行编程。在IBM研究实验室的Andreas Heinrich团队最近的工作中，量子信息处理的世界不仅仅是纳米技术，还有原子技术，已经令人兴奋地连接起来了。这不仅为量子计算*开辟了全新的途径，而且通过在固态器件中控制自旋（其功耗在许多应用中越来越不可持续）来实现更节能的经典信息处理。虽然非常令人印象深刻，但IBM团队实现的单原子量子位是在一个定制的材料系统上制造和操纵的，该材料系统涉及金属基板上的薄氧化膜。不幸的是，这不是最具技术相关性或可扩展性的架构。相反，我们的“新视野”应用涉及的是硅单原子水平的信息处理、逻辑和自旋控制，硅是我们信息社会的核心材料，而且很可能在未来相当长一段时间内保持这种地位。我们将利用阿尔伯塔大学Bob Wolkow团队在原子尺度布尔门制造方面的最新进展，基于在原子雕刻的硅表面上产生的电子轨道令人惊讶的“天生”磁性，开发一种新的自旋逻辑架构。

The last decade has seen staggering advances in our ability to acquire and process information at the single atom and single molecule levels. Both the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and its slightly younger sibling, the atomic force microscope (AFM), now enable individual atoms to be probed, positioned, and, in essence, programmed by exploiting control of an impressively wide variety of physicochemical processes and properties right down to the single chemical bond limit.In recent work by Andreas Heinrich's team at IBM Research Labs, the worlds of quantum information processing and not just nanotechnology, but atomtech, have excitingly been bridged. This opens up entirely new approaches to not just quantum computing* but much more energy-efficient classical information processing via spin control in solid state devices (whose power consumption is increasingly unsustainable for many applications.)Although exceptionally impressive, the single atom qubits achieved by the IBM team are fabricated and manipulated on a bespoke material system involving a thin oxide film on a metal substrate. This is unfortunately not the most technologically relevant or scalable of architectures. Our New Horizons application instead involves information processing, logic, and spin control at the single atom level in silicon, a material that remains at the very core of our information society and will likely remain there for quite some time to come. We will exploit recent advancements in the fabrication of atomic-scale Boolean gates by Bob Wolkow's team at the University of Alberta to develop a new spin logic architecture based on the surprising "innate" magnetism of electron orbitals created on an atomically sculpted silicon surface.