{"id":234732,"date":"2026-04-07T02:35:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T07:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/quantum-ground-state-of-rotation-achieved-for-the-first-time-in-two-dimensions"},"modified":"2026-04-07T02:35:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T07:35:48","slug":"quantum-ground-state-of-rotation-achieved-for-the-first-time-in-two-dimensions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/quantum-ground-state-of-rotation-achieved-for-the-first-time-in-two-dimensions","title":{"rendered":"Quantum ground state of rotation achieved for the first time in two dimensions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-ground-state-of-rotation-achieved-for-the-first-time-in-two-dimensions.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state\u2014in two orientational degrees of freedom.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41567-026-03219-1\" target=\"_blank\">Reporting<\/a> in <i><i>Nature Physics<\/i>,<\/i> they show how <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-03-ground-state-cooling-nanoparticle-motion.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">optical cooling<\/a> confines the nanoparticle\u2019s orientation to within the bounds of quantum zero-point fluctuations, the unavoidable orientational uncertainty imposed by Heisenberg\u2019s uncertainty principle. Such quantum-limited alignment is an important milestone towards rotational matter-wave interferometry and ultra-sensitive quantum torque sensing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state\u2014in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234732","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=234732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}