Eurekalert has a press release about new results involving “articifical atoms” at Yale. This is new work appearing in this week’s Nature from the Schoelkopf lab.
The term “artificial atoms,” while evocative, doesn’t really mean what you might think (the name they give it on their own page is Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics, which is more accurate, but too technical for the mass media). What Schoelkopf and his group have done is to fabricate very small structures on silicon chips that act in a manner similar to atoms, with discrete allowed states for the electrons, and absrobing or emitting radiation only on transitions between those states. They can then do a bunch of the same sorts of experiments people do with real atoms, and this paper is demonstrating some useful features of the system when it comes to interacting with light at microwave frequencies.
These systems have a couple of advantages over real atoms, chief among them being that they can tune the properties of the “atoms” to a degree not possible with real atoms, using the expertise people have developed in the fabrication of computer chips. Also, they’re much larger, and tend to stay where they’re put, which is not a trivial matter.
Like everyone else in the world of quantum optics, the application they have in mind is quantum information processing. They’ve probably got as good a shot as anyone of making a quantum computer out of this stuff. And even if they don’t, it’s pretty cool to be able to do quantum optics experiments in these sorts of mesoscopic solid state systems.