Could this thing be attached to a solid substrate, perhaps a semiconductor, and remain in place? Like in a computer chip
What about using that free electron in the middle to do computing? Perhaps a quantum computer or something
I mean that's what reminded me: quantum computers often trap a charged particle, perhaps an ion or electrons, and use it to store qubits. This stuff here seems to be a perfect electron trap. Or isn't it?
(note, I'm just throwing ideas in the air, I know almost nothing of chemistry, semiconductors or quantum computers)
Not far from reality, indeed. Every time you have some molecule with a free electron, you can perform Electron Spin Resonance on it. You take a small amount of the molecule, put in a strong magnectic field, and with microwave you could drive the transition between the down and up state (parallel and antiparallel to the magnetic field). However, with a conventional spectrometer you can't control a single spin, because its signal would be tremendosly low, you would need at least ~10^13 molecules (maybe even less nowadays). If you want to use a single molecule, you need to connect to some kind of nanofabricated structure, in order to control and read it out. It's feasible, many works showed that, but very very difficult to engineer. You could spend most of your phd trying that (a pretty common tale in the field).
That's actually not a terrible idea! But sadly the ion seems to be unstable, which means ithe electron is not 'trapped' and rather free to interact with it's cage.
What about using that free electron in the middle to do computing? Perhaps a quantum computer or something
I mean that's what reminded me: quantum computers often trap a charged particle, perhaps an ion or electrons, and use it to store qubits. This stuff here seems to be a perfect electron trap. Or isn't it?
(note, I'm just throwing ideas in the air, I know almost nothing of chemistry, semiconductors or quantum computers)