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Someone
told you that you can't create something out of nothing? Why, sure you
can! At least in the quirky world of quantum physics.
Physicists have created light out of nothing by simulating moving a mirror at nearly the speed of light:
At the heart of the experiment is one of the weirdest, and most important, tenets of quantum mechanics: the principle that empty space is anything but. Quantum theory predicts that a vacuum is actually a writhing foam of particles flitting in and out of existence.
The existence of these particles is so fleeting that they are often described as virtual, yet they can have tangible effects. For example, if two mirrors are placed extremely close together, the kinds of virtual light particles, or photons, that can exist between them can be limited. The limit means that more virtual photons exist outside the mirrors than between them, creating a force that pushes the plates together. This 'Casimir force' is strong enough at short distances for scientists to physically measure it.
For decades, theorists have predicted that a similar effect can be produced in a single mirror that is moving very quickly. According to theory, a mirror can absorb energy from virtual photons onto its surface and then re-emit that energy as real photons. The effect only works when the mirror is moving through a vacuum at nearly the speed of light — which is almost impossible for everyday mechanical devices. [...]
The physicists have managed to build such a "mirror-like" device using quantum electronics, and confirmed the predictions: Link
Image from NeatoShop's Sciencists Do It T-Shirts series: Dyslexic Physicists Do It With Hadrons
What do you get when quantum physicists learn to play a con game? A paper in Nature Physics, of course!
We won’t pretend to understand a word in this report at Physorg, but we hope it will one day bring on a quantum super computer so we can play Angry Bird really, really fast.
According to the paper, the "shell man," the researcher, makes use of two superconducting quantum bits (qubits) to move the photons –– particles of light –– between the resonators. The qubits –– the quantum-mechanical equivalent of the classical bits used in a common PC –– are studied at UCSB for the development of a quantum super computer. They constitute one of the key elements for playing the photon shell game.
"This is an important milestone toward the realization of a large-scale quantum register," said Mariantoni. "It opens up an entirely new dimension in the realm of on-chip microwave photonics and quantum-optics in general."
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If you think you’ve got a firm grasp on reality, obviously you’re not a quantum physicist.
Recently, a new study by physicists in Australia revealed that quantum entanglement – a puzzling quantum physics phenomenon that Einstein himself called "spooky action at a distance" – also exists in respect to time.
I’ll skip the technical explanation (not that I understand it anyhow), but the study posits an interesting idea:
… Olson and Ralph’s teleportation provides a shortcut into the future. What they’re saying is that it’s possible to travel into the future without being present during the time in between.
That’s a fascinating scenario that immediately raises many questions. One of the first that springs to mind is what advantage might we get from this process. Might it be possible, for example, to make short-lived particles live longer by teleporting them into the future?
The tiny sliver of metal above, measuring as long as the human hair is wide, may be barely visible to the naked eye, but its implication to science is so staggering that it is hailed as the greatest scientific breakthrough of 2010.
Behold, the world’s first quantum machine:
It’s not much to look at. In fact, you can barely see it with the naked eye, and it doesn’t work unless it’s cooled down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. But when researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara created their tiny vibrating "springboard," that represented "the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object," said Adrian Cho, a news writer for Science.
"On a conceptual level, that’s cool because it extends quantum mechanics into a whole new realm," he said. "On a practical level, it opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality."
One of the more bizarre principles of quantum mechanics is that something can be in two states simultaneously: both on and off, both 1 and 0. Under just the right conditions, UCSB’s aluminum nitride oscillator took on a single quantum of motion, so that it vibrated both a little and a lot at the same time.
UCSB’s Aaron O’Connell, John Martinis and Andrew Cleland reported their results in March in the journal Nature. At the time, Cleland told me that "we were just trying to demonstrate quantum effects in a big thing."
"But a possible application would be if you try to detect these acoustic vibrations at the quantum level," he said. "You could do it with this. You could use it as a quantum microphone, or a quantum loudspeaker." Such devices might also be used to read out the results of a quantum computer’s calculations.
No word on whether Schroedinger’s cat is jumping for joy/already dead, but you can celebrate this achievement with the NeatoShop‘s latest physics T-shirt:
Look Out Schroedinger’s Cat, It’s a Trap! by Mike Jacobsen – $14.95
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Just when you think that things can’t get any weirder, quantum physics threw us (yet another) curve ball: there may be a brand new form of matter governed by an entirely new branch of physics.
Back in 1970, a young physicist working in the Soviet Union made a counterintutive prediction. Vitaly Efimov, now at the University of Washington in the US, showed that quantum objects that cannot form into pairs could nevertheless form into triplets.
In 2006, a group in Austria found the first example of such a so-called Efimov state in a cold gas of cesium atoms.
That’s puzzling. Surely the bonds that hold triplets together are the same as those that bind pairs. Actually, no! It turns out that there is a subtle but important difference that makes these bonds completely different.
Today, Nils Baas at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology makes another startling prediction. He says that the strange, unworldly bonds that allow cesium atoms to stick together in triplets should allow much more complex objects to form too. In fact, he says we’re on the verge of discovering a brand new form of matter governed by an entirely new branch of physics.
Lenore over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog created this bra-ket bookends perfect for your quantum mechanics textbooks. Dirac would’ve been proud though Heisenberg would’ve warned about the uncertainty of having objects heavier than books that may fall out of the shelf.
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