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Researchers At Brown University Shattered a Quantum Wave Function
Jason Koebler writes: A team of physicists based at Brown University has succeeded in shattering a quantum wave function. That near-mythical representation of indeterminate reality, in which an unmeasured particle is able to occupy many states simultaneously, can be dissected into many parts. This dissection, which is described this week in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, has the potential to turn how we view the quantum world on its head. Specifically, they found it's possible to take a wave function and isolate it into different parts. So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes.
Umm.... I still don't get what the article is trying to articulate. Can someone explain? All I was able to grasp is that the particles can be in multiple states of x1,y1,z1 and x2,y2,z2. But what's the point?
Which one is the right one ?
Brown?
;)
Brown???
Sorry, I knew too many Brownies back in my uni days. More likely, they just forgot about "bigger bottom, better borrow" and broke the wave function the old fashioned way.
/ I could also have gone with "paid daddy to break it for them", but took the high ground... this time!
One of these days humanity will get the Galactic Darwin Award.
"Here at the LHC, News 9 is about to witness the first ever batch of artificial mini black holes. Here comes the first one now...oh shi~ ^& [NO CARRIER]
Table-ized A.I.
"...cordoned off like quantum crime scenes." I like creative usage of metaphors in science.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
The more you dig, the more there'll be.
Shadoobie, shattered, shattered.
IANAP but haven't they just constrained the distribution of probability somehow? I mean how it's distributed in space. Don't we do this every morning when we put our pants on?
So, does this or does this not give us the basis for the Heisenberg compensators?
Might quantum stuff me less random and unknowable than we've been told?
And, yes, I don't understand Quantum anything, other than knowing it makes your whites whiter, and has a smooth minty taste.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"An error occurred during a connection to news.brown.edu. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap)"
If YOU can connect, your browser still allows SSLv3.
A team of physicists based at Brown University has succeeded in shattering a quantum wave function
Well hurry up and put it back together! i use these damned functions all the time and i cant spend another 6 years as a graduate assistant!!
Good people go to bed earlier.
"An electron in liquid helium forces open a cavity referred as an electron bubble. These objects have been studied in many past experiments. It has been discovered that under certain conditions other negatively charged objects can be produced but the nature of these “exotic ions” is not understood. We have made a series of experiments to measure the mobility of these objects, and have detected at least 18 ions with different mobility. We also find strong evidence that in addition to these objects there are ions present which have a continuous distribution of mobility. We then describe experiments in which we attempt to produce exotic ions by optically exciting an electron bubble to a higher energy quantum state. To within the sensitivity of the experiment, we have not been able to detect any exotic ions produced as a result of this process. We discuss three possible explanations for the exotic ions, namely impurities, negative helium ions, and fission of the electron wave function. Each of these explanations has difficulties but as far as we can see, of the three, fission is the only plausible explanation of the results which have been obtained."
Research group website
Non-paywalled copy of paper
TLDR: This research group studies exotic electron effects in superfluid helium. They see a particular effect that is not currently explained. There are a few possible explanations, and they argue that a particular one is probably true.
Inaccurate "news" articles ensue.
(The physics is subtle enough that, despite reading the abstract and bits of the paper, I would not venture to try to summarize it. You can smell a mile away, though, that this article is poor understanding mixed with hyperbole. The specific flavor is, "Quantum Mechanics is Philosophical Magic".)
It is determinism all the way down. Else we'd have ND-FSA right now in meat space.
Where does the math meet real-world engineering?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Is this really new news?
I thought this phenomen was already well demonstrated by the Josephson effect for electrons in super conductoirs? If one makes the insulating barrier small enough, at low temperature, then there's a probably that the electron in a superconductor can be on the other side of the insulating barrier because of the wave function of the location and you can actually get a current flow from the wave fucntion causing electrons for having a definite probablity for being on the other side.
It just seems that they've discovered another effect of the probablity spread of an electron. But, honestly, I couldn't tell from the description in the article which compared probability spaces to crime scenes.
Researchers At Brown University Shattered a Quantum Wave Function
Initial reports of recent events don't usually go for the past tense. It looks a bit weird.
So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes.
Yeeaaah... I'm not sure that analogy is as helpful as the author hoped.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This sounds like a way to detect many of the possible positions of a particle at the same time. Could this be useful for quantum computing?
I never did like this one...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'll venture a summary of their experiment and hypothesis, though I didn't read the paper itself and I won't swear that it's accurate:
When a single electron enters a container of helium superfluid it repels the surrounding atoms, creating a bubble of definite size, which proceeds to slowly sink to the detector at the bottom at a determinate rate based on it's size - the larger the bubble, the slower it sinks. Before those electron-bubbles reach the detector; however, it is apparently detecting additional, unexplained charges traveling at at least 18 discrete speeds and, more rarely, charges that seem to travel on a continuous spectrum of speeds. They believe it to be unlikely that there are a sufficient range of impurities in the fluid to explain such a large number of speeds, and hence an alternate explanation should be sought.
Their hypothesis is that these additional charges are in fact smaller bubbles formed by electron wave functions being partially reflected at the liquid's surface: on impact an electron may either enter the fluid, or bounce off. Or, thanks to quantum superposition, it may do both simultaneously with varying levels of probability. In the latter case the partial wavefunction that did penetrate the fluid surface could be expected to create smaller (faster) bubbles in a variety of sizes - some of the electron probability is not within the bubble, and so the repulsion effect is lower and the bubble correspondingly smaller and faster moving.
As I understand it the implication is that simply interacting with the helium is insufficient "measurement" to collapse the wavefunction, instead it gets to maintain a partial presence until such time as it interacts with the detector, which measures it's presence with sufficient definitiveness that the electron must then be wholly present or absent. This would be a revolutionary finding as it would be the first time that a superposition of states has been detected to measurably impact the interaction of a particle with its environment - in all previous QM experiments when a wavefunction collapsed and a single particle was detected, its position and velocity were consistent with the history of a single classical particle traveling along the path that ended in detection, and superposition could only be detected in the statistical distribution of detections, such as the interference patterns of a two-slit experiment.
If correct, this could be a major step forward in determining what exactly constitutes a "measurement" for the purposes of collapsing a quantum wavefunction, a question which has thus far gone almost completely unanswered and spans the complete range from the vague "interaction with the macroscopic world" to the quasi-mystical "observed by a conscious mind"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Carver Mead (national medal of technology winner, father of chip design, founder of several billion$ physics based companies) has a simpler, more realistic model of an electron: it is not a point-particle that somehow orbits a nucleus, nor is it a magical probability cloud that materializes when observed; rather a bound electron is a 2D surface wave of EM energy in the shape of a shell surrounding a nucleus. The shape of the shell ("orbital") depends on the energy of the wave interacting with other bound electrons. The electron's wave stores/releases energy by absorbing/emitting photons of a resonant frequency. The size of an unbound electron depends on how much energy is stored in the wave - it could be 10 feet in diameter.
Here's an interview where Mead explains http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
Reporter: "So how big is an electron?"
Mead: "It expands to fit the container it's in. That may be a positive charge that's attracting it--a hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That's what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that. It's its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across."
Reporter: "A ten-foot electron! Amazing"
Mead: "It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long."
Reporter: "A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world--most people's minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems."
“No one is sure what actually constitutes a measurement. Perhaps physicists can agree that someone with a Ph.D. wearing a white coat sitting in the lab of a famous university can make measurements. But what about somebody who really isn’t sure what they are doing? Is consciousness required? We don’t really know.”
If so, you can just about guarantee that we're living in a simulation.
will we be able to commun -
q439542-dir34r0q=
-- civilization disconnected, return to base
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I just hope they have a spare!
It would be bad to explain to your teacher "I couldn't finish my report because I broke my only quantum wave function!!!"
So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes.
Oh, like crime scenes. That really clears things up! Thanks to the power of analogy, I finally understand quantum hoo-hah as it applies to wave functions, much like I know that space-time is a rubber sheet, superstring theory is about tiny strings, and the multiverse is a giant loaf of bread.
Emmet Brown, is that you?
This is not the sig you're looking for.
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
That's pretty much the way I understand it. This is exciting enough so that I am going to read through the full published article. If true (can't wait for others to try to reproduce it), then one of the stranger things implied is that while in a superposition of different positions, other particles feel the electron's field not just in proportion to 1/r^2 but also in proportion to its probability amplitude of being in that particular position at all. It also seems to provide a way around the "decoherence means you can't test for observation anyway" excuse for ignoring the weirder parts of QM.
It never ceases to make me laugh and pound on the table simultaneously why there is so many who seem to be morons who take up political science for a career choice when it isn't even a science to begin with, unlike those who strain their brains on quantum or particle physics. Take the unknown state dept loudmouth who just called the Israeli PM a coward and chicken shit.
WAY TO GO
Please don't invoke pseudoscientific bullshit.
Does that mean that a wave can be split into two smaller waves, and therefore a quantum particle is really a discrete wave, that is not always discrete.