Imagine you are standing in a grocery store buying apple juice. Unfortunately, all of the crates are half empty because other customers have removed individual bottles at random. So you carefully fill your crate bottle by bottle. But wait: The neighboring crate is filled in exactly the opposite way! It has bottles where your crate has gaps. If you could lift these bottles in one hit and place them in your crate, it would be full straight away. You could save yourself a lot of work.
Unfortunately, such solutions don't (yet) exist for half-empty drinks crates. However, physicists at the University of Bonn want to sort thousands of atoms however they like in the future in this way – and in a matter of seconds. Around the world, scientists are currently looking for methods that enable sorting processes in the microcosm. The proposal by Bonn-based researchers could push the development of future quantum computers a crucial step forward. This allows atoms to interact with each other in a targeted manner in order to be able to exploit quantum-mechanical effects for calculations. In addition, the particles have to be brought into spatial proximity with one another.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-machine-atoms.html#jCp