16 ms·

"A device comprising a single atom." So... an atom?

• JadeNB 8y ago
  > "A device comprising a single atom." So... an atom? The quote comes from the story itself, and, while strange things happen between an academic's mouth and a reporter's keyboard, I'm willing to trust that there's some technicality that means that the apparently simpler phrasing is in some sense incorrect, or less desireable. Here's how the story describes it: > To prove this, Romero and colleagues constructed a tiny machine known as a photonic quantum switch – essentially a gate mechanism built from a single atom, that can be turned on and off by using a single photon.