{"id":96892,"date":"2019-10-01T18:42:52","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T01:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/non-abelian-aharonov-bohm-experiment-done-at-long-last"},"modified":"2019-10-01T18:42:52","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T01:42:52","slug":"non-abelian-aharonov-bohm-experiment-done-at-long-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/non-abelian-aharonov-bohm-experiment-done-at-long-last","title":{"rendered":"Non-abelian Aharonov-Bohm experiment done at long last"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/non-abelian-aharonov-bohm-experiment-done-at-long-last2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time, physicists in the US have confirmed a decades-old theory regarding the breaking of time-reversal symmetry in gauge fields. <a href=\"https:\/\/web.mit.edu\/physics\/people\/faculty\/soljacic_marin.html\">Marin Soljacic<\/a> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an international team of researchers have made this first demonstration of the \u201cnon-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect\u201d in two optics experiments. With improvements, their techniques could find use in optoelectronics and fault-tolerant quantum computers.<\/p>\n<p>First emerging in Maxwell\u2019s famous equations for classical electrodynamics, a gauge theory is a description of the physics of fields. Gauge theories have since become an important part of physicists\u2019 descriptions of the dynamics of elementary particles \u2013 notably the theory of quantum electrodynamics.<\/p>\n<p>A salient feature of a gauge theory is that the physics it describes does not change when certain transformations are made to the underlying equations describing the system. An example is the addition of a constant scalar potential or a \u201ccurl-free\u201d vector potential to Maxwell\u2019s equations. Mathematically, this does not change the electric and magnetic fields that act on a charged particle such as an electron \u2013 and therefore the behaviour of the electron \u2013 so Maxwell\u2019s theory is gauge invariant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time, physicists in the US have confirmed a decades-old theory regarding the breaking of time-reversal symmetry in gauge fields. Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an international team of researchers have made this first demonstration of the \u201cnon-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect\u201d in two optics experiments. With improvements, their techniques could [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96892","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\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}