Quantum dispersed crystolecules
The idea here is to reduce the constraint on position and orentation of nanoscale to microscale components (crystolecules, ...)
by levitating them weakly constrained.
Thereby they become trapped free particles and may start to nanomechanically quantum disperse.
Then the situation that "nanomechanics is barely mechanical quantummechanics" no longer holds.
Contents
Motivation
Why would one want to do this?
A main goal in atomically precise manufacturing is to gain and retain
control over position and orientation of atoms and molecules. Not to deliberately let go of it.
See: The defining traits of gem-gum-tec
Good question.
Curiosity, research, ...,
Exploiting some special effects that are yet to discover?
Self suggesting (thought?) experiments
Warning! you are moving into more speculative areas.
It seems that it should be possible to split up the wave function of quantummechanically dispersed nanomechanical components
into two (or more) spacially disjunct parts without collapsing the wave function.
Suggested experimental process:
- Release a nanoscale component into a long linear levitation chamber
- By just waiting a bit let it quantum mechanically disperse into a dispersed matter wave function.
- Split up the wave function in exactly two (dichotomic) parts by making the central position energetically undesirable (repulsive potential)
- (Leave splitting into more than two parts for advanced experiments)
- Widen the separating "energetic wall" to push the now split up parts of the wave function sufficiently far apart to the outer ends of the chamber
- At the now well cleared out central spot separate the long levitation chamber into two individual levitation chambers that can be transported separately. (Physical walls optional?)
- Take many of such prepared halve-of-wave-function-carrying levitation chambers and transport them to two far away places.
- Try to get significantly more than 50% of the wave function to collapse at only one of these places.
For the transport of "levitated fractional matter wave functions" to work it's necessary to assume that the technology will get really good at preventing decoherence over long times.
(Via: extreme cooling, very good isolation, and atomic precision). Especially with bigger parts that sounds really challenging.
Questions:
- When collapsing the wave function deliberately in a naive way (like squeezing to check if something is in there),
will this lead to on average 50% of the components end up on either side? Like in experiments with light polarization? - Are there strategies (maybe taken from quantum computing) that can be employed to influence that ratio only after the separating transport?
- What if a shape matching Van der Waals binding site is presented in only one of the two (now far apart) half-of-wave-function-carrying chambers?
A binding site that makes a wave collapse on that side energetically much more favorable. This makes it seem more plausible.
Hypotetical application: Instant transport ("one way physical nanoscale beaming")
Assuming this actually does work (very questionably):
An application would be to send stuff to two (or more) place
and only after the transport decide how much to keep or sent to which place.
This may be useful for scenarios where it is known that intermittently a sudden unpredictable emergency demand for something can occur Someing that cannot be mechanosynthesized fast enough.
Given that assembly of pre-produced microcomponents is likely quite a bit faster than piezochemical mechanosynthesis:
Couldn't one just pre-mechanosynthesize a stock of all the eventually needed stuff?
Because if we don't even know what we eventually might need then even this exotic quantum "one way beaming" won't help.
Well, pre-mechanosynthesizing and keeping a stock of a huge possibility space maybe not be possible on a nautic-ship (or a space-ship)
where there is not enough space (and or mass carrying capacity) for big stocks of stuff that is eventually needed in super high urgency.
This raises the question:
- What would be the storage density of "quantum disperdsed component storage cells"?
- How many different kinds of components can be stored in a single levitation chamber?
- If multiple components in one chamber: How to prevent them from aggregating together in their quantum mechanical frame of reference.
Interesting thought:
From the quantum mechanical frame of reference of the levitated components all of reality around them becomes quantum-dispersed.
They "see" themselves transported to two different places at the same time in an whole external reality splitting way.
This becomes pretty wild if the qunatum-dispersable components become big enough to be able to implement simple comutational capabilities
It should not be possible to exceed the volume storage capacity of a levitation chamber.
When we already that a (delibearately) wave-collapsed-component say component "A" was so big that it filled most of the whole levitation chamber
then we know that no other component "B" of similar size can have been in there because
the parts would have needed to sterically massively overlap, which is just not possible.
Entanglement it seems.
Scarce elements
It's a bit different for scarce elements including expensive precious metals:
- many parties may know that they eventually need to buy or borrow the same scarce element
- there's no storage space or mass burden – so this seems not only relevant for sips
- one may send them as small (packaged?) atom clusters – a trade-off between decoherence prevention difficulty and storage density?
- to avoid needing to buy the expensive scarce element it eventually needs to be shipped back by the now only possible conventional transport
(possibly splitting it up quantum mechanically again)
What needs to work to make this a reality
- does the splitting work? – seems likely
- does preventing decoherence over long timespans (days, weeks, months, years) work – seems hard
- does collapsing in a ration different to 50% work – good and likely most critical question here
(TODO: Investigate (refute/corroborate) the idea of resource "one way beaming")
The smaller the components the easier it should be to prevent decoherence.
Qualitative and quantitative investigations are needed.
- What are the effects nanomechanical component decoherence
- How big are the
There should be quite a bit of existing work
e.g. scattering of buckyball matter waves on diffraction gratings.
