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Tag Archives: quantum physics
Super-photon: A Bose-Einstein condensate with practical potential
Illustrated super-photon….Credit: Jan Klaers, University of Bonn Is it time to start investing in Bose-Einstein condensates? They’re not dew drops, of course. Anything with ‘Einstein’ in it has got to be physics. So what kind of condensate is this, and what makes it (potentially) useful? The concept of Bose-Einstein condensates, often abbreviated BEC, was theorized [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Also tagged absolute zero, BEC, Bose, Bose-Einstein, boson, condensate, Einstein, photon, super-photon, visible light, x-ray 4 Comments
Changing the frame of reference for quantum mechanics
Is there a relationship between the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and quantum nonlocality? Only a quantum physicist should know, or care. Wrong, at least in one way. Granted, quantum mechanics is a tough subject. So is your brain. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing about. As for quantum physicists knowing about such a relationship, well [...]
Posted in Impact: Quantum Physics Also tagged action at a distance, entanglement, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, information theory, nonlocality, physics 2 Comments
Graphene finds mass appeal
Thanks to the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics, graphene is a hot topic. That doesn’t mean it’s a household word. Graphene is not like pencil lead, which most people know is graphite. (That may hold for another generation or two, pencils are disappearing into tiny niches.) Yet graphene is graphite. Same stuff, pure carbon, just [...]
Posted in Impact: Nanotechnology Also tagged carbon, Dirac equation, graphene, mass, massless, mathematics, nanotube, physics Leave a comment
Physics: A smaller proton, a big challenge
The proton is one of the fundamental components of the atom. For a long time scientists have believed it to be 0.8768 femtometers in size (a femtometer is one quadrillionth of a meter). Now, it looks like they may have been wrong, the size is 0.84184 femtometers. In a way, the discrepancy is very small…as [...]
Posted in Impact: Nuclear Physics Also tagged electron orbit, femtometer, laser spectroscopy, muon, nuclear physics, proton, QED Leave a comment
Quantum dots do it: The dark pulse laser
Lasers come in many variations of light: Red, blue, infrared, ultraviolet and so on. Now there is a laser that produces non-light – the dark pulse laser. Developed by a joint project of the National Institute of Standards (NIST, USA) and Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA, University of Colorado, USA), the dark pulse laser [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Also tagged crystals, dark pulse, JILA, laser, NIST, qdots, quantum dots, semiconductor Leave a comment
A first: Spintronics made visible
It’s an important emerging field, spintronics; though it’s not too well known. It’s based on a quantum property of electrons – they spin. Some electrons spin ‘up,’ some spin ‘down’ and if you can get a device to read that state of up or down, that’s the basis for many kinds of electronics. This includes [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Also tagged atoms, electrons, scanning tunneling microscopy, spin, spin down, spin up, spintronics, STM Leave a comment
Quantum physics (like life?) in higher temperature entanglement
It’s been ‘common knowledge’ in the physics community that experiments with quantum entanglement, that weird state where two objects share the same existence, can only take place at extremely low temperatures – roughly a maximum of 4 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. (That’s about -457F or –272C.) It therefore gives physicists something like what Americans [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Also tagged absolute zero, entanglement, Heisenberg uncertainty, Kelvin, quantum oscillators 1 Comment
Update: Quantum photosynthesis
Just to underline the post Quantum mechanics in photosynthesis, oh my. there’s another take on the interpretation and significance of the research at Cosmic Variance. Here’s a sample: We can think about this in terms of Feynman’s way of talking about quantum mechanics: rather than a particle taking a unique path between two points, as [...]
A Golden Ratio found. A clue to quantum symmetry?
There is probably nothing that makes mathematicians and physicists happier than discovering that untidy models resolve into harmonies and order. This may be especially true for the often described as ‘bizarre’ world of quantum physics. Take a ‘chain’ of cobalt niobate atoms – like a magnetic bar one atom wide. Cool the chain to near [...]
Posted in News: Nuclear Physics Also tagged cobalt niobate, Golden Ratio, mathematics, quantum critical state Leave a comment
A two-qubit computer
Another step on the way to developing a quantum computer was recently taken with the demonstration of a two-qubit computing processor (previously, one-qubit processors). Much more work will be needed to reduce the error rate of such processors, and eventually to be able to link them together to solve larger (and more interesting) calculation problems, [...]
The robin flies with quantum coherence