{"id":164068,"date":"2023-05-17T14:22:32","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T19:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/curved-spacetime-in-a-quantum-simulator"},"modified":"2023-05-17T14:22:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T19:22:32","slug":"curved-spacetime-in-a-quantum-simulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/curved-spacetime-in-a-quantum-simulator","title":{"rendered":"Curved spacetime in a quantum simulator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/curved-spacetime-in-a-quantum-simulator.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The theory of relativity works well when you want to explain cosmic-scale phenomena\u2014such as the gravitational waves created when black holes collide. Quantum theory works well when describing particle-scale phenomena\u2014such as the behavior of individual electrons in an atom. But combining the two in a completely satisfactory way has yet to be achieved. The search for a \u201cquantum theory of gravity\u201d is considered one of the significant unsolved tasks of science.<\/p>\n<p>This is partly because the mathematics in this field is highly complicated. At the same time, it is tough to perform suitable experiments: One would have to create situations in which phenomena of both the relativity theory play an important role, for example, a spacetime curved by heavy masses, and at the same time, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+effects\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum effects<\/a> become visible, for example the dual particle and wave nature of light.<\/p>\n<p>At the TU Wien in Vienna, Austria, a new approach has now been developed for this purpose: A so-called \u201cquantum simulator\u201d is used to get to the bottom of such questions: Instead of directly investigating the system of interest (namely quantum particles in curved spacetime), one creates a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/model+system\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">model system<\/a>\u201d from which one can then learn something about the system of actual interest by analogy. The researchers have now shown that this quantum simulator works excellently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The theory of relativity works well when you want to explain cosmic-scale phenomena\u2014such as the gravitational waves created when black holes collide. Quantum theory works well when describing particle-scale phenomena\u2014such as the behavior of individual electrons in an atom. But combining the two in a completely satisfactory way has yet to be achieved. The search [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164068","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\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}