{"id":112822,"date":"2020-09-10T04:25:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T11:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/quantum-simulations-of-curved-space"},"modified":"2020-09-11T04:57:38","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T11:57:38","slug":"quantum-simulations-of-curved-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/quantum-simulations-of-curved-space","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Simulations of Curved Space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-simulations-of-curved-space.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A heptagonal-lattice superconducting circuit, and the mathematics that describe it, provide tools for studying quantum mechanics in curved space.<\/p>\n<p>According to John Wheeler\u2019s summary of general relativity, \u201cspace-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve.\u201d How this relationship plays out at the quantum scale is not known, because extending quantum experiments to curved space poses a challenge. In 2019, Alicia Koll\u00e1r and colleagues at Princeton University met that challenge with a photonic circuit that represents the negatively curved space of an expanding universe [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v13\/s114#c1\" class=\"\">1<\/a>]. Now, Igor Boettcher and colleagues at the University of Maryland, College Park, describe those experiments with a new theoretical framework [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v13\/s114#c2\" class=\"\">2<\/a>]. Together, the studies offer a toolkit for studying quantum mechanics in curved space that could help answer fundamental questions about cosmology.<\/p>\n<p>In a universe that expands at an accelerating rate, space curves away from itself at every point, producing a saddle-like, hyperbolic geometry. To project hyperbolic space onto a plane, Koll\u00e1r\u2019s team etched a centimeter-sized chip with superconducting resonators arranged in a lattice of heptagonal tiles. By decreasing the tile size toward the edge of the chip, the researchers reproduced a perplexing property of hyperbolic space: most of its points exist on its boundary. As a result, photons moving through the circuit behave like particles moving in negatively curved space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A heptagonal-lattice superconducting circuit, and the mathematics that describe it, provide tools for studying quantum mechanics in curved space. According to John Wheeler\u2019s summary of general relativity, \u201cspace-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve.\u201d How this relationship plays out at the quantum scale is not known, because extending quantum experiments [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33,2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112868,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112822\/revisions\/112868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}