Until recently, the field of nonlinear, and generally chaotic, dynamics of billiards (i.e. particles or waves bouncing between sharp reflecting walls) developed separately from the area of atomic physics. Recent achievements in laser cooling and manipulating of atoms made it possible to "play pool" with neutral atoms, creating a new testing ground for classical and quantum chaos. Understanding the dynamics of chaotic billiards with novel properties, such as inter-billiard collisions or moving billiard walls, may prove useful in exploring new ways of controlling atoms and photons. In this talk, I will discuss the "proof of principle" experiments, and possible future directions of research in this new and exciting field.

The talk will be based on the recent paper [1]. I will give a brief review of the recent research and development of ultrasmall electron devices, including nanoscale field effect transistors (FETs), single-electron transistors (SETs), and some other new devices and nanometer-scalable memory cell concepts. It will be argued that nanofabrication permitting, silicon FETs can be scaled down to ~3 nm gate length, although sub-5-nm devices would be extremely sensitive to random fabrication spreads, and their power consumption would grow very significantly. So far no other device, comparable with the FET in universality, has been found for sub-3-nm operation so far. For example, single-electron transistors, which are scalable to atomic size (below 1 nm), suffer from low voltage gain and high sensitivity to single charged impurities. However, there are several promising ideas for terabit memories and electrostatic data storage, and some exciting prospects of using hybrid SET/FET circuits in new architectures for advanced information processing, including self-evolving neuromorphic networks.
[1] K. Likharev, in: H. Morkoc (ed.), Advanced Semiconductor and Organic Nano-Technologies, Pt. 1, Academic Press (2002)