{"id":239420,"date":"2026-06-22T06:10:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T11:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/quantum-mechanics-theory-may-work-without-imaginary-numbers-new-analysis-suggests"},"modified":"2026-06-22T06:10:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T11:10:24","slug":"quantum-mechanics-theory-may-work-without-imaginary-numbers-new-analysis-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/quantum-mechanics-theory-may-work-without-imaginary-numbers-new-analysis-suggests","title":{"rendered":"Quantum mechanics theory may work without imaginary numbers, new analysis suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-mechanics-theory-may-work-without-imaginary-numbers-new-analysis-suggests2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Physicists from Heinrich Heine University D\u00fcsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In an article published in the journal <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>, they show that this theory does not necessarily need to be formulated with imaginary numbers\u2014real numbers can, in fact, also be used.<\/p>\n<p>The physical theory of quantum mechanics describes the world of atomic and subatomic particles. Its development began in the 1900s with physicists such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger.<\/p>\n<p>Quantum mechanics can effectively describe phenomena at microscopic scales, including, for example, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2025-07-famous-quantum-essentials.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">the diffraction of particles at a double slit <\/a>\u2014which shows that particles also exhibit wave-like behavior\u2014and the quantum tunneling effect, in which a certain probability exists that particles can penetrate a barrier even if they have insufficient energy to do so. Particularly important phenomena today include entanglement and coherence, which are key for applications such as quantum computers and communication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists from Heinrich Heine University D\u00fcsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In an article published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they show that this theory does not necessarily need to be formulated with imaginary numbers\u2014real numbers can, in fact, also be used. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239420","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}