Computers, electronics and technology are an interesting part of our daily lives, and often involve aspects of the very small — the unseen, the infinitesimal. We live in a world where these unseen technologies are everywhere and are growing exponentially day in and day out.
Sometimes these technologies don’t directly affect our lives and they’re buried off somewhere in some far-off lab, like the largest machine in the world, scheduled to start back up at double power in the next few weeks, that discovered the “God particle” (Higgs Boson). Or sometimes they do affect our lives directly, either positively as something like a convenient Netflix account, electricity, the Internet or sometimes they affect us in a negative fashion. From a Canadian standpoint, I can’t help but think about the huge news story some time back when around 70 million Target shoppers' information was hacked. We all heard the story somewhere and possibly know someone who was a victim of this breach.
Let’s suppose, and suspend our disbelief for just a second, there are scientists and researchers out there working on these issues, trying to build an unhackable Internet and secure digital communications. Just as our electronics and electricity work through understanding and dealing with the flow of electrons, a subatomic particle, so too is there deeper research into the smallest particles in the world, and how we can learn to understand and control them. There is a giant machine that has been operating since 2008 and its job is to understand the very small. The study of the physics of the very small is termed quantum mechanics and currently there is research into creating a quantum Internet.
To better understand the co-plexity of subatomic particles and what they’re made of, the largest single machine in the world, the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland, is a 27 kilometre long particle accelerator buried 574 feet below the surface of the foremost scientific lab — CERN. This machine smashes together protons, and other particles, to see what comes out of these collisions. It’s like smashing together two cars at very high speeds in order to see what smaller parts explode out from the insides during the collision. These protons are accelerated by hundreds of superconducting electromagnets to almost the speed of light. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second.
Another interesting subatomic particle is the photon and it’s involved in creating Northern Lights when solar particles interact with Earth’s electromagnetic field. Our planet is like a giant dynamo, a generator that creates its own magnetic field much like the field around a bar magnet. The sun’s corona emits a solar wind that carries charged particles, protons and electrons, towards our planet. These particles then interact with the field and sometimes head towards the north and south poles as a current. They then clash with and excite atoms of oxygen and nitrogen contained in atmospheric gases. This interaction releases energy as photons to display multicolored arrangements of dancing light. A fluorescent bulb works much the same way when an electric current excites mercury vapor to emit photons seen as light.
The photon is the subatomic particle being studied in new research on the prospects of a quantum Internet, an Internet for the far off future that currently seems more science fiction than real.
Based on the physics of quantum mechanics, researchers have discovered a photon can exist in two states at the same time — called superposition — and two photons are linked from distances — called entanglement. Researchers have begun to play around with the idea of using manipulated photons to transmit information in order to produce a super-fast and highly-secure Internet.
To enable super-fast computing and a super-fast Internet, quantum bits, or qubits, can outperform traditional bits by carrying out more than one function at a time using superposition to be in two states at once, whereas traditional binary is either one or zero at one time. To enable a highly secure Internet and electronic communications, entanglement altered photons will enable a breach to be detected because linked photons communicate with each other when one has been tampered with or altered. Secure messages will be sent using quantum cryptography and/or quantum key distribution (QKD) that helps detect eavesdropping by third parties and also serves other security functions. These are just a few examples in this new world of atomic computing searching for advanced security.
As for checking on exploration close to home, research on the quantum Internet is currently being conducted at the University of Calgary in their faculty of science. There researchers are hoping quantum information technology will help resolve issues with existing communication security gaps. In our province, we have a particle accelerator at the University of Saskatchewan called the synchrotron. The synchrotron is used for research in advancing medicine, developing new drugs, nanotechnology and much more when it comes to the physics of the very small.
