Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: quantum physics – Page 556

Researchers discover new quantum state in a quirky material

It can boost conductivity by a billion percent.

A collaboration of physicists working at different institutes in the U.S. have discovered a new quantum state in an alloy made of magnesium, silicon, and tellurium, a press release said. The finding could result in applications in quantum computing, such as building sensors and communication systems.

Electrons can move around freely inside the structure.

Vchal/istock.

The alloy is a crystalline structure denoted as Mn3Si2Te6 and consists of octagonal cells placed in a honeycomb-like arrangement when viewed from above. Though, when viewed from the side, it consists of stacked sheets.

Energy out of thin air? Quantum mechanics seemingly produces magic energy

“This is real physics, not science fiction”.

A group of researchers essentially pulled energy out of nothing using a quirk of quantum mechanics. Two different physics experiments proved the feat is possible when they drew energy out of an energy vacuum by teleporting energy across microscopic distances.

The new experiments drew on a 2008 theory from theoretical physicist Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University, as per a report from Quanta Magazine.

Masahiro Hotta’s energy teleportation theory.

Koto_feja / iStock.

Two different physics experiments proved the feat is possible when they drew energy out of an energy vacuum by teleporting energy across microscopic distances.

Continue reading “Energy out of thin air? Quantum mechanics seemingly produces magic energy” | >

New quantum state boosts material’s conductivity by a billion percent

Scientists at Georgia Tech have discovered a new quantum state in a quirky material. In a phenomenon never before seen in anything else, the team found that applying a magnetic field increased the material’s electrical conductivity by a billion percent.

Some materials are known to change their conductivity in response to a changing magnetic field, a property called magnetoresistance. But in the new study, the material does so to an incredible degree, exhibiting colossal magnetoresistance.

The material is an alloy of manganese, silicon and tellurium, which takes the form of octagonal cells arranged in a honeycomb pattern, and stacked in sheets. Electrons move around the outside of those octagons, but when there’s no magnetic field applied they travel in random directions, causing a traffic jam. That effectively makes the material act like an insulator.

Quantum Mechanics Helps Physicists Pull Energy Out of Thin Air as Evident in Two Separate Experiments

A shelved theory seems to have given new life to energy teleportation, a concept that pulls energy from one location to another. The notion might sound like science fiction, but some scientists demonstrated that it is possible to generate energy out of thin air.

According to The Space Academy, scientists were able to extract energy and filled a vacuum through two separate experiments. It has indeed opened a fresh world of quantum energy physics.

Physicists Levitated a Glass Nanosphere, Nudging It Into The Realm of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain.

In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are constantly attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

Back in 2021, a team succeeded with a tiny glass nanosphere that was 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

Freezing Particle Motion with a Matrix

Researchers predict that the “scattering matrix” of a collection of particles could be used to slow the particles down, potentially allowing for the cooling of significantly more particles than is possible with current techniques.

When light travels through an environment containing many particles, information about the collective motion of the particles gets added to the light. This information leaves a measurable signature on a quantity known as the scattering matrix. Now researchers from the Vienna University of Technology predict that the information in this matrix could be used to alter the speeds of the particles [1, 2]. The team says that, if experimentally realized, the technique could allow scientists to study the collective quantum behavior of more particles than is possible with current techniques.

Researchers have long been fascinated with using light to slow down or even freeze the motion of a collection of particles. One motivation is that cooled particles can be isolated from outside influences in order to study quantum behaviors such as entanglement. To date, researchers have simultaneously cooled one or two particles, but they have struggled to scale techniques to cool additional particles.

/* */