Word: photon
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...wait, there’s more! The Vapir is also armed with a purple laser light, which in Vapir-brochure-hyperbolic-speak is elegantly termed the “Herbal Illuminative Photon Ejector,” so that the user can see the essence of plant before becoming one with it. The on-panel digital display also features a handy alarm to alert you when digital aromatherapy session should end and your post-digital-aromatherapy-session snack should begin. Future models of the Vapir even promise a USB port so that the device can interface with the Internet or your...
Hughes runs his experiments in the rugged, volcanic Jemez mountains that surround Los Alamos--which, as an ultramarathon runner, he knows intimately. He sets up a laser and fires a burst of light so precise it consists of a single photon. The photon flies at (what else?) the speed of light to a finely calibrated receiver 2 km away, which collects it like a catcher snagging a Randy Johnson fastball. By sending a series of photons polarized at different angles, Hughes can transmit information: each particle represents a single bit--a 1 or a 0, in computer language...
...result is an untappable line of communications. It would be easier for a potential eavesdropper to pick a single snowflake out of a blizzard than to track down a single photon in flight. What's more, like snowflakes, photons are fragile: according to the surreal logic of quantum physics, the very act of observing one alters it irrevocably...
...thing - comes to mind. But most folks, when they think of taming light, dream of super-fast, super-small computers, and that seems to be where this all headed. A so-called quantum computer - one that used light instead of electricity - could use switching mechanisms moved by a single photon. Quantum communications could never be eavesdropped upon. Without the ability to control light, work in that field had run out of room. Now scientists appear to be well on their way to making light, nature's most elusive form of energy, do whatever they want...
...said her process will be useful in building highly sensitive optical switches--switches that can be thrown by a single photon...