‘Universal’ Programmable Two-Qubit Quantum Processor Created

NIST postdoctoral researcher David Hanneke at the laser table used to demonstrate the first universal programmable processor for a potential quantum computer. A pair of beryllium ions (charged atoms) that hold information in the processor are trapped inside the cylinder at the lower right. A colorized image of the two ions is displayed on the monitor in the background. (Credit: J. Burrus/NIST)

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the first “universal” programmable quantum information processor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics — the rules governing the submicroscopic world — using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically could solve some important problems that are intractable today.

The NIST demonstration, described in Nature Physics, marks the first time any research group has moved beyond demonstrating individual tasks for a quantum processor — as done previously at NIST and elsewhere — to perform programmable processing, combining enough inputs and continuous steps to run any possible two-qubit program.

The NIST team also analyzed the quantum processor with the methods used in traditional computer science and electronics by creating a diagram of the processing circuit and mathematically determining the 15 different starting values and sequences of processing operations needed to run a given program. “This is the first time anyone has demonstrated a programmable quantum processor for more than one qubit,” says NIST postdoctoral researcher David Hanneke, first author of the paper. “It’s a step toward the big goal of doing calculations with lots and lots of qubits. The idea is you’d have lots of these processors, and you’d link them together.”

The NIST processor stores binary information (1s and 0s) in two beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms), which are held in an electromagnetic trap and manipulated with ultraviolet lasers. Two magnesium ions in the trap help cool the beryllium ions.

NIST scientists can manipulate the states of each beryllium qubit, including placing the ions in a “superposition” of both 1 and 0 values at the same time, a significant potential advantage of information processing in the quantum world. Scientists also can “entangle” the two qubits, a quantum phenomenon that links the pair’s properties even when the ions are physically separated.

With these capabilities, the NIST team performed 160 different processing routines on the two qubits. Although there are an infinite number of possible two-qubit programs, this set of 160 is large and diverse enough to fairly represent them, Hanneke says, making the processor “universal.” Key to the experimental design was use of a random number generator to select the particular routines that would be executed, so all possible programs had an equal chance of selection. This approach was chosen to avoid bias in testing the processor, in the event that some programs ran better or produced more accurate outputs than others.

Ions are among several promising types of qubits for a quantum computer. If they can be built, quantum computers have many possible applications such as breaking today’s most widely used encryption codes, such as those that protect electronic financial transactions. In addition to its possible use as a module of a quantum computer, the new processor might be used as a miniature simulator for interactions in any quantum system that employs two energy levels, such as the two-level ion qubit systems that represent energy levels as 0s and 1s. Large quantum simulators could, for example, help explain the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity, the transmission of electricity with zero resistance at temperatures that may be practical for efficient storage and distribution of electric power.

The new paper is the same NIST research group’s third major paper published this year based on data from experiments with trapped ions. They previously demonstrated sustained quantum information processing and entanglement in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. NIST quantum computing research contributes to advances in national priority areas, such as information security, as well as NIST mission work in precision measurement and atomic clocks.

In the latest NIST experiments reported in Nature Physics, each program consisted of 31 logic operations, 15 of which were varied in the programming process. A logic operation is a rule specifying a particular manipulation of one or two qubits. In traditional computers, these operations are written into software code and performed by hardware.

The programs did not perform easily described mathematical calculations. Rather, they involved various single-qubit “rotations” and two-qubit entanglements. As an example of a rotation, if a qubit is envisioned as a dot on a sphere at the north pole for 0, at the south pole for 1, or on the equator for a balanced superposition of 0 and 1, the dot might be rotated to a different point on the sphere, perhaps from the northern to the southern hemisphere, making it more of a 1 than a 0.

Each program operated accurately an average of 79 percent of the time across 900 runs, each run lasting about 37 milliseconds. To evaluate the processor and the quality of its operation, NIST scientists compared the measured outputs of the programs to idealized, theoretical results. They also performed extra measurements on 11 of the 160 programs, to more fully reconstruct how they ran and double-check the outputs.

As noted in the paper, many more qubits and logic operations will be required to solve large problems. A significant challenge for future research will be reducing the errors that build up during successive operations. Program accuracy rates will need to be boosted substantially, both to achieve fault-tolerant computing and to reduce the computational “overhead” needed to correct errors after they occur, according to the paper.

As a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

 

1. D. Hanneke, J.P. Home, J.D. Jost, J.M. Amini, D. Leibfried & D.J. Wineland. Realization of a programmable two-qubit quantum processor. Nature Physics, Online November 15, 2009 DOI: 10.1038/nphys1453

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091115134128.htm

Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet’s biggest problems

By Patrick Thibodeau

There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world’s most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless “what-if” scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren’t big enough — and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system.

 

Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world’s fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops.

But Jaguar’s record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The U.S. Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that’s 1,000 times more powerful — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The later project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the U.S. is co-developing.

“There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today,” said Bland.

As amazing as supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. It wasn’t until 1997 that the first teraflop system, ASCI Red at Sandia National Lab, broke the teraflop barrier, reaching one trillion calculations per second. In 2008 IBM’s Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory achieved petaflop speed, or one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

The Energy Department, which is responsible for funding many of the world’s largest systems, wants two machines somewhere in the 2011-13 timeframe that will reach approximately 10 petaflops, said Bland.

But the next milestone now getting attention from planners is something that can reach an exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second, (one quintillion). That’s 1,000 times faster than a petaflop.

The exaflop will likely arrive around 2018. The big performance leaps are expected to happen every decade or so. Moore’s Law, which says the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months or so, helps to explain the roughly 10-year development period. But the problems involved in reaching exaflop scale go well beyond Moore’s Law.

Story Continues - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140928/Supercomputers_with_100_million_cores_coming_by_2018

High-performance Plasmas May Make Reliable, Efficient Fusion Power A Reality

Artist’s rendering of a tokamak plasma. The plasma is confined by the combination of strong magnetic field in the toroidal direction (around the hole in the “donut” as shown by the black arrow) generated by external coils (not shown) and the magnetic field from a large current flowing in the same toroidal direction. The plasma is held inside a sealed metal structure that is evacuated and lined with special material to keep the plasma pure and handle the heat exhaust. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)

In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions.

These new findings will be presented at the American Physical Society — Division of Plasma Physics 51st annual meeting, November 2-6, at the Atlanta Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Nuclear fusion energy has kept the sun burning for billions of years. When nuclear fusion occurs in a laboratory, power performance is determined by the temperature and density achieved by plasma, an ionized gas formed when hydrogen isotopes are heated to temperatures of over 10 million degrees Celsius. Because of these extreme temperatures, the hot plasma is confined by magnetic fields in a “tokamak”, a donut-shaped device surrounded by powerful electromagnets.

Over the past decade, scientists have made tremendous progress toward realizing high pressures for increasingly long periods. A key element of recent experiments is the confirmation of theoretical predictions that one can rely on the walls of the tokamak chamber to improve plasma stability at high pressure.

Once plasma becomes sufficiently hot and dense, fusion occurs, producing large quantities of high-energy helium ions (known as alpha particles). For optimal efficiency, this self-generated heat must be well contained within the tokamak’s “magnetic bottle.” Models have predicted that the heat loss from the tokamak due to turbulence is quite sensitive to the exact details of the magnetic field configurations. Researchers recently found that turbulence is minimized in the same configuration necessary for achieving the highest pressures. Hence, performance and efficiency can be synergistic.

Interestingly, turbulent eddies in the plasma can also affect plasma heating by high-energy helium nuclei formed by the fusion of hydrogen atoms. Recent theoretical work suggests that these energetic particles not only feel turbulence differently, but can also stir up large eddies of their own. While these fine-scale turbulent eddies are predicted to cause negligibly small transport of energetic alpha particles, the new large eddies can increase this transport substantially. As the alpha particles cool, their transport becomes similar to the background level.

For high reliability, a tokamak needs to sustain the hot and dense plasma for as long as possible. Recent work has shown that tokamak plasmas can be induced to exhibit the following relationships: higher pressure => more self-generated electrical currents that help control the plasma => less reliance on external controls => longer pulse (including potentially steady-state) operation => higher reliability.

After decades of effort to improve the behavior and output of fusion plasmas, scientists are discovering that nature may actually be so kind as to simultaneously allow high performance (lots of electricity!), optimal efficiency (affordable!), and high reliability (the electrical outlet will always work!) in the design of future power plants. Work supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-FC02-04ER54698.

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Adapted from materials provided by American Physical Society.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091102103327.htm

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics

by Vijaysree Venkatraman

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

His research involves embedding nanoscale and microscale electronic devices in substrates like paper or plastic. He also wears contact lenses. “It was a matter of putting the two together,” he says.

Fitting a contact lens with circuitry is challenging. The polymer cannot withstand the temperatures or chemicals used in large-scale microfabrication, Parviz explains. So, some components – the power-harvesting circuitry and the micro light-emitting diode – had to be made separately, encased in a biocompatible material and then placed into crevices carved into the lens.

One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn’t need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

Parviz says that future versions will be able to harvest power from a user’s cell phone, perhaps as it beams information to the lens. They will also have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so that it appears suspended in front of the wearer’s eyes.

Despite the limited space available, each component can be integrated into the lens without obscuring the wearer’s view, the researchers claim. As to what kinds of images can be viewed on this screen, the possibilities seem endless. Examples include subtitles when conversing with a foreign-language speaker, directions in unfamiliar territory and captioned photographs. The lens could also serve as a head-up display for pilots or gamers.

Mark Billinghurst, director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is impressed with the work. “A contact lens that allows virtual graphics to be seamlessly overlaid on the real world could provide a compelling augmented reality experience,” he says. This prototype is an important first step in that direction, though it may be years before the lens becomes commercially available, he adds.

The University of Washington team will present their prototype at the Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCas 2009) conference at Beijing later this month.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18146-contact-lenses-to-get-builtin-virtual-graphics.html

Superconductors to Wire a Smarter Grid

Cool power: These superconducting wires form the basis of power cables that carry far more power than conventional copper cables.    Credit: American Superconductor

A superstation for connecting three independent grids could help solar and wind power.

By Kevin Bullis

A proposed hub for connecting the three independent electricity grids that span the continental United States could make it easier to ramp up production of renewable electricity.

The project, called the Tres Amigas Superstation, would use superconducting “pipelines” and converter stations to connect three grids: the Western, Eastern, and Texas Interconnections. Connections between the grids have been limited because the grids aren’t synchronized–the AC power is out of phase. Special stations that convert AC power into DC power and then back into AC power in the correct phase are needed to move power from one grid to another.

Only a fraction of 1 percent of the electricity generated in the United States can currently be transferred between the grids, and there is no direct connection between Texas and the Western grid. The Tres Amigas station, which will connect all three grids together in one place for the first time, will initially more than double the ability to transfer power between them, providing five gigawatts of capacity. Eventually, the station is expected to transfer as much as 30 gigawatts of power.

The station will “solve a host of problems” related to renewable energy, says Phil Harris, CEO of the Tres Amigas company, based in Santa Fe, NM. Primarily, it will help address a key problem with renewable sources of energy–their intermittency. Because wind comes and goes and clouds block the sun from time to time, wind and solar power can destabilize the electric grid.

One way to compensate is to make sure that no renewable source accounts for too much of the total power mix–so that other sources can easily fill in when there’s a drop in power. In Texas, however, this strategy would quickly limit the size of wind farms, since the grid there is relatively small. By connecting to the rest of the country, Tres Amigas removes the limit on the size of these farms.

Intermittency can also be addressed by gathering renewable energy over a wide area. That way, a drop in solar power due to a cloudy day in one region could be offset by wind or solar elsewhere. Connecting the three grids makes it possible to draw on a wider variety of renewable sources, especially in the Southwest, which is divided by the borders between them. The station will also provide between 50 and 150 megawatts of battery storage to smooth out power fluctuations on the grid to help prevent outages.

The project could also be a valuable testing ground for direct current superconducting transmission lines, which could have significant advantages over conventional power lines for delivering large amounts of power over long distances, says Steven Eckroad, a project manager at the Palo Alto, CA-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which is studying the potential of superconductors for long-distance transmission. Such transmission lines could collect wind power from the Midwest, where it is abundant, and transmit it to the South, which has fewer renewable resources.

Power shifting: Power comes into the Tres Amigas station from three power grids and circulates inside a superconductor pipeline that all three grids can draw from.    Credit: Tres Amigas

To connect all three grids required a place where they were geographically close together–in the case of Tres Amigas, a 60-square-kilometer swath of land near Clovis, NM. As with conventional connections between the grids, the system converts AC to DC. But unlike conventional two-way connections, at Tres Amigas that DC power will then circulate in superconducting cables that form a triangular electrical pipeline. Any of the three grids can draw power from this, as needed.

Providing five gigawatts, and eventually 30 gigawatts, of transfer capacity between all three grids required the use of superconducting DC lines, which greatly reduced the number of cables needed to carry the power–a single superconducting cable can carry the same power as nine or 10 sets of conventional copper cables. If the conventional cables were suspended overhead, they, along with the incoming and outgoing transmission lines, would have created a “rat’s nest” vulnerable to weather and sabotage, says Jack McCall, a director of business development at Devens, MA-based American Superconductor, which is supplying the superconducting cables.

Burying conventional cables would add to the complexity and size of the project, since the cables would need to be kept several meters apart to avoid overheating. What’s more, each cable would require its own substation. At first, only one superconducting cable would be needed–greatly simplifying the system compared to using conventional cables. As Tres Amigas is expanded, more cables will be needed, but these can be buried close to each other.

In addition to connecting the three grids Tres Amigas will serve as a demonstration of the type of DC superconducting lines and AC-to-DC converters that would be needed for high-power, long distance transmission lines–the superconductor “pipeline” EPRI has studied. Such a system could be easier to site than conventional overhead high-power transmission lines: the superconducting cables can be buried along existing rights of way, such as along interstate highways. Convincing land owners to allow large overhead transmission towers is one of the biggest obstacles to installing conventional transmission lines, and it could stymie efforts to develop a system for distributing wind power from the Midwest. Superconducting transmission lines could also be easier to integrate with the existing grid, since the amount of power converted from DC to AC power at stations along the line could be precisely controlled.

According to the EPRI analysis, a superconductor pipeline would cost about as much as a conventional transmission line, if the superconductor system were designed to transmit high amounts of power (greater than five gigawatts) over long distances (around 1,000 miles). This is in part because the cost for refrigerating superconducting lines (required to maintain their superconducting properties) becomes a small share of the total system costs. Also, at long distances, the higher efficiency of superconducting systems is important–about half as much energy is wasted as with conventional high-power, long-distance power lines.

But it is a technology that companies aren’t familiar with, and so they may be reluctant to roll it out at the scale required for it to be cost-competitive, Eckroad says. The Tres Amigas project could be important to demonstrating that the technology works, he says.

McCall says that Tres Amigas plans to file with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the coming weeks–clearing that regulatory hurdle is the next step for the company. If that goes well, the initial five-gigawatt system could be completed by the end of 2014.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23928/

New ‘FinFETs’ Promising For Smaller Transistors, More Powerful Chips

Researchers are making progress in developing new types of transistors, called finFETs, which use a finlike structure instead of the conventional flat design, possibly enabling engineers to create faster and more compact circuits and computer chips. The fins are made not of silicon, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide, as shown in this illustration. (Credit: Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University)

Purdue University researchers are making progress in developing a new type of transistor that uses a finlike structure instead of the conventional flat design, possibly enabling engineers to create faster and more compact circuits and computer chips.

The fins are made not of silicon, like conventional transistors, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide. Called finFETs, for fin field-effect-transistors, researchers from around the world have been working to perfect the devices as potential replacements for conventional transistors.

In work led by Peide Ye, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the Purdue researchers are the first to create finFETs using a technology called atomic layer deposition. Because atomic layer deposition is commonly used in industry, the new finFET technique may represent a practical solution to the coming limits of conventional silicon transistors.

“We have just demonstrated the proof of concept here,” Ye said.

Findings are detailed in three research papers being presented during the International Electron Devices Meeting on Dec. 7-9 in Baltimore. The work is led by doctoral student Yanqing Wu, who provided major contributions for two of the papers.

The finFETs might enable engineers to sidestep a problem threatening to derail the electronics industry. New technologies will be needed for industry to keep pace with Moore’s law, an unofficial rule stating that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months, resulting in rapid progress in computers and telecommunications. Doubling the number of devices that can fit on a computer chip translates into a similar increase in performance. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue shrinking electronic devices made of conventional silicon-based semiconductors.

In addition to making smaller transistors possible, finFETs also might conduct electrons at least five times faster than conventional silicon transistors, called MOSFETs, or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors.

“The potential increase in speed is very important,” Ye said. “The finFETs could enable industry to not only create smaller devices, but also much faster computer processors.”

Transistors contain critical components called gates, which enable the devices to switch on and off and to direct the flow of electrical current. In today’s chips, the length of these gates is about 45 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

The semiconductor industry plans to reduce the gate length to 22 nanometers by 2015. However, further size reductions and boosts in speed are likely not possible using silicon, meaning new designs and materials will be needed to continue progress.

Indium-gallium-arsenide is among several promising semiconductor alloys being studied to replace silicon. Such alloys are called III-V materials because they combine elements from the third and fifth groups of the periodical table.

Creating smaller transistors also will require finding a new type of insulating layer essential for the devices to switch off. As gate lengths are made smaller than 22 nanometers, the silicon dioxide insulator used in conventional transistors fails to perform properly and is said to “leak” electrical charge.

One potential solution to this leaking problem is to replace silicon dioxide with materials that have a higher insulating value, or “dielectric constant,” such as hafnium dioxide or aluminum oxide.

The Purdue research team has done so, creating finFETs that incorporate the indium-gallium-arsenide fin with a so-called “high-k” insulator. Previous attempts to use indium-gallium-arsenide finFETs to make devices have failed because too much current leaks from the circuit.

The researchers are the first to “grow” hafnium dioxide onto finFETs made of a III-V material using atomic layer deposition. The approach could make it possible to create transistors using the thinnest insulating layers possible — only a single atomic layer thick.

The finlike design is critical to preventing current leakage, in part because the vertical structure can be surrounded by an insulator, whereas a flat device has the insulator on one side only.

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Consortium and is based at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue’s Discovery Park.

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Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University. Original article written by Emil Venere.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110171746.htm

LaserMotive finally wins NASA’s Elevator:2010 Beam Power Challenge, climbs at 3.9 meters/second

by Tim Stevens

NASA has been trying to find someone that could meet its rigorous Space Elevator demands since 2005 and, after some notable failures, we finally have a winner. A company called LaserMotive has won the Beam Power Challenge, tasked with creating a laser-powered robot able to lift a weight on a cable at a speed of greater than two meters per second. LaserMotive’s bot nearly doubled that, managing 3.9 meters per second in one test. It was the only competitor to beat the requirement, meaning it gets the full $900,000 prize, and if anyone ever gets around to winning the Tether Challenge we might just be able to get somewhere. Nausea-inducing test video is embedded below.

[Via NewScientist]

Follow the link for a video - http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/lasermotive-finally-wins-nasas-elevator-2010-beam-power-challen/

Black Hole Engine That Could Power Spaceships

Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn’t the world’s most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland’s ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. “With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing…we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships.” Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. “Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy.”

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. “Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards”, say Crane and Westmoreland, so it’s merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

Send an email to Tim Barribeau, the author of this post, at tim@io9.com.

http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships?skyline=true&s=x

Mutant Diseases May Cripple Missions to Mars, Beyond

Ker Than
for National Geographic News

November 4, 2009

Mutant hitchhikers may become a major hurdle in the quest to send humans deeper into the galaxy, scientists say.

That’s because no matter how fit astronauts feel at liftoff, they’re likely to be carrying disease-causing microbes such as toxic E. coli and Staphylococcus strains.

Charged particles zipping through space, known as cosmic rays, can mutate the otherwise manageable microbes, spurring the bugs to reproduce quicker and become more virulent, recent studies show.

(Related: “Lethal Bacteria Turn Deadlier After Space Travel.”)

At the same time, exposure to cosmic rays and the stresses of long-term weightlessness can dampen the human immune system, encouraging diseases to take hold.

Aboard spaceships without advanced medical care, illness could cripple human missions to Mars and beyond, according to a new report published this month in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. (Get Mars exploration pictures, facts, and more.)

“What is the interest of having people on Mars if they cannot efficiently perform the analyses and studies scheduled during their mission?” said study co-author Jean-Pol Frippiat, an immunologist at Nancy University in France.

Cells Change in Zero G

For the new report, Frippiat and colleagues analyzed more than 150 studies of the effects of space flight on humans, animals, and pathogens. (Get the scoop on how low gravity makes it harder to get pregnant in space.)

On Earth humans are protected from the effects of cosmic rays, because most of the particles are deflected by the planet’s magnetic field.

Out in space, however, such protections vanish, and cosmic radiation can cause mutations when it strikes the DNA inside cells. (Find out more about where cosmic rays come from.)

The absence of gravity can also be detrimental to human health, because weightlessness allows structures to shift around within cells.

Article Continues – http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091104-space-diseases-mutants-mars.html

Charged particles zipping through space, known as cosmic rays, can mutate the otherwise manageable microbes, spurring the bugs to reproduce quicker and become more virulent, recent studies show.

(Related: “Lethal Bacteria Turn Deadlier After Space Travel.”)

At the same time, exposure to cosmic rays and the stresses of long-term weightlessness can dampen the human immune system, encouraging diseases to take hold.

Aboard spaceships without advanced medical care, illness could cripple human missions to Mars and beyond, according to a new report published this month in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. (Get Mars exploration pictures, facts, and more.)

“What is the interest of having people on Mars if they cannot efficiently perform the analyses and studies scheduled during their mission?” said study co-author Jean-Pol Frippiat, an immunologist at Nancy University in France.

Cells Change in Zero G

For the new report, Frippiat and colleagues analyzed more than 150 studies of the effects of space flight on humans, animals, and pathogens. (Get the scoop on how low gravity makes it harder to get pregnant in space.)

On Earth humans are protected from the effects of cosmic rays, because most of the particles are deflected by the planet’s magnetic field.

Out in space, however, such protections vanish, and cosmic radiation can cause mutations when it strikes the DNA inside cells. (Find out more about where cosmic rays come from.)

The absence of gravity can also be detrimental to human health, because weightlessness allows structures to shift around within cells.

Space shuttle successor completes crucial flight test

The Ares 1-X rocket lifts off on Wednesday (Image: NASA TV)

by David Shiga

NASA has successfully launched a test version of the Ares I rocket it is developing to replace the space shuttle.

Ares I is designed to loft a crew capsule called Orion to low-Earth orbit. Initially it would travel to the International Space Station, but later it would act as the first leg of missions to the moon, taking a crew capsule to low-Earth orbit, where the capsule would dock with other spacecraft that would get the rest of the way there.

The Ares I-X test vehicle lifted off at 1130 EDT (1530 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Wednesday. The launch had been postponed a day due to bad weather.

A solid-fuel first stage, like those used on the space shuttle, boosted a dummy second stage and crew capsule high into the atmosphere – the planned altitude was 45 kilometres. The flight was designed to test Ares I’s flight-control software and to determine how prone the rocket is to forces that could cause unwanted spin during flight.

As planned, the spent first stage separated from the second stage and capsule. It is expected to use parachutes to land in the Atlantic Ocean, where NASA will retrieve it for analysis.

Despite the successful test, the future of Ares I is far from secure. The project has been plagued with budget and schedule problems as well as technical hurdles, including a tendency to vibrate excessively.

A panel appointed by the White House to review NASA’s human space flight plans recently raised the possibility of cancelling Ares I and using commercial launch vehicles to access the International Space Station instead.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18067-space-shuttle-successor-completes-crucial-flight-test.html