Back in 1971, the James Bond movie title ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ wouldn’t have occurred to anyone as notably significant. It just looked appropriate for a film in which Agent 007 investigates the disappearance of certain diamonds in transit. But another James, Australian inventor Dr. James Rabeau, has changed all that. The new title could be ‘Diamonds Are for Bond”, and tomorrow’s real-life Bonds will use diamonds cooked in a micro oven to stop information theft.

It is not easy to bulk-handle diamonds, as James Bond realized while trying to deliver 50,000 carats of them to SPECTRE. Besides, large diamonds sparkle, “a quality that makes them a girl’s best friend but a scientist’s headache”. Nano-crystals offer a solution. Their average grain size is a 30 nanometers, and they greatly reduce the troublesome background light. And you can use Nano-carat rocks to single out photons (light particles). Many high speed communication networks use photons to transfer information these days

Photons alone won’t solve the problem. Optical fibers all over the world carry trillions of them, transferring all manner of sensitive details, but thieves need to steal only a few photons to crack the message code. When you transmit that many photons nobody would recognise it if a 100 or 1000 of them are amiss. But if you use single photons to encode information, hackers who steal one of them won’t get any useful information and, at the same time, you will be alerted about the information test.

This is ‘quantum cryptography’. The concept has been around since the 1980s, but then nobody knew how to reliably create single particles at room temperature. Rabeau uses a technique called chemical vapour deposition that takes place in a glorified microwave oven and deposits diamond crystals at one end of an optical fiber. Single photons are born when a laser hits the diamond-encrusted tip of the optical fiber, and they pass through the optical fiber as part of a message”.

The laws of quantum physics stop a person from stealing a photon and cleverly resending it to the original intended party to cover up the theft. But normally photons are lost as they pass through very long optic fiber. So the initial networks should be limited to some 100 kilometers or so. To handle greater distances, you will need a quantum repeater capable of amplifying the single-photon messages. Achieve this, and you get what you may call a ‘quantum internet’.

SNEAK PREVIEW

# It was Einstein who came up with the mind-boggling concept of magnifying glasses in the sky, nearly a century ago. Extremely massive objects with immense gravitational pull can both bend and magnify light passing by. So far scientists had observed only the bending, but a new study shows that magnification too takes place. Called gravitational lensing, the effect is much like what happens when light passes through a microscope. Light coming from 200,000 quasars indeed gets magnified by about one percent as it passes through a quantity of dark matter — an invisible substance that makes up about 80% percent of the mass of the universe.

# When pursued by hungry falcons, feral pigeons give as good as they get. Researcher Alberto Palleroni and colleagues recently watched more than 1,800 peregrine falcon attacks on pigeons. Hunting peregrines hurtled toward the pigeons at more than 200 miles per hour, hoping to knock their prey out of the sky. To escape, the pigeons dipped a wing and veered off in another direction. Pigeons with a white rump patch are found to be far more likely to survive the attacks. The flash of white plumage smartly distracts falcons — long enough for pigeons to execute the wing dip undetected.

QUIZ NO.180

1. Who was the first two-time Booker Prize winner?

– Peter Carey
– Kingsley Amis
– Salman Rushdie
– J.M. Coetzee

1. J.M. Coetzee.

2. Which tennis champion is deeply involved with his country’s soccer activities?

– Boris Becker
– Stefan Edberg
– Goran Ivanisevic
– Sergi Bruguera

2. Boris Becker

3. Who made a record containing an ultrasonic whistle audible only to dogs?

– Beatles
– Thomas Edison
– Whitney Houston
– Rolling Stones

3. Beatles (“A Day in the Life”).

4. You are expected to peel potatoes well if you are a young bride in …

– Peru
– Mozambique
– Domican Republic
– South Africa

4. Peru

5. They say a famous poet invented the sitar. Name him.

– Nund Reshi
– Amir Khusro
– Somadeva Bhatta
– Mirza Ghalib

5. Amir Khusro