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QD Vision, based in Watertown, MA, is promoting a new LED-based lamp that it made with Nexxus Lighting of Charlotte, NC. Nexxus makes a lamp designed to screw into standard sockets used in recessed ceiling lighting. It consists of an array of white-light LEDs encircled by fins that remove excess heat. QD Vision adds an optic--a plastic cover with a special coating that snaps into place over the LEDs. It's that coating that makes the difference in the quality of the light. It consists of quantum dots--tiny bits of semiconductor material just a few nanometers in diameter.

A team of physicists from Austria has sent pairs of entangled photons, which can be used to encrypt messages with complete security, between telescopes spaced 144km apart in the Canary Islands. The researchers say that preserving entanglement over this distance shows the feasibility of carrying out quantum cryptography using a worldwide network of satellites.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have proved, for the first time, that the lifetime of quantum-computing bits can be extended. In their experiment, they showed that by applying specially timed magnetic pulses to qubits, made of beryllium ions, they could prolong the life of the quantum bits from about one millisecond to hundreds of milliseconds. The work is described in this week's Nature.

The realization of a universal quantum computer that can carry out arbitrary computations remains a long term goal. But the technologies developed so far enable us to perform so called quantum simulations. Here assemblies of directly controllable quantum particles form models for complex systems which are difficult to manipulate. A new, promising technique was now developed in the group of Professor Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching.

The intrinsic rotation of electrons - the "spin" - remains unused by modern electronics. If use as an information carrier were possible, the processing power of electronic components would suddenly increase to a multiple of the present capacity. In cooperation with colleagues from Dortmund, St. Petersburg and Washington, Bochum physicists have now succeeded in aligning electron spin, bringing it to a controlled "waver" and reading it out. The electron spin can also be realigned as required at any time using optical pulses.