In the everyday, large-scale world, we tend to think things are one way or the other. For example, if I flip a coin, it’s either heads or tails. This deterministic nature provides the basis of today’s electronics design and green electronics manufacturing.
Quantum engineering indicates that both energy and information are not continuous but instead come in small “packets” known as quantum and that the reality is really probabilistic instead of deterministic.
On large scales the probabilistic consequences of quantum engineering are averaged out and, therefore, undetectable. However, at the nanometer (10-9 meters) scale, quantum engineering cannot be ignored and in fact begins to dominate for electronic design.
The fusion of nanotechnology and quantum engineering leads to the design of new types of nanodevices and nanoscale materials, where functionality and structure of quantum nanodevices are described through quantum phenomena and principles such as observational dependency, superposition and entanglement, as summarized below:
* Observational dependency: observing certain things on the subatomic level (like photons) actually caused them to have different properties. Just like, if I flip a quantum coin, when you look at a coin from the top, it is heads and when you look at it from the bottom it is tails.
* Superposition: subatomic particles exist in all of their possible states at the same time until they are observed. It’s as if the coin was both heads-up and tails-up while I have it covered with my hand. When I lift my hand up and you look at the coin, it then resolves to either heads or tails.
* Entanglement: a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently—instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole. This is like having an entangled pair of our superposition heads/tails block and placing them on opposite sides of the coin. As soon as one of them is observed — let’s say it becomes heads — we observe it’s entangled counterpart and find that it, too, becomes heads.
Experiments have demonstrated entangled behavior many times and shown that the entangled particles ‘sync up’ their quantum states instantly, no matter how far apart they are. That’s a little surprising because the particles are exchanging information faster than the speed of light, and nothing is supposed to go faster than the speed of light. This is basis of quantum information, coping with uncertainty at the nanometer scale.
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