On the smallest conceivable scale, the scale of fundamental particles, the building blocks of everything around us, the world behaves very differently from what we are used to. Things can be in multiple places at once, and another strange thing, they can affect each other instantly, even if the distance between them is several miles. This happens through a ghostly connection that physicists call “entanglement”.
In the current issue of the commercial magazine Science Describes a group of American physicists How did they now also cause this strange behavior, described in the laws of quantum physics, in small barrels weighing about 70 pg (one-millionth of a millionth of a gram)?
“ This sounds a bit, but it’s insanely heavy by quantum standards – as heavy as a drop from an inkjet printer, ” says physicist Carlo Benacere (University of Leiden). Since physicists are mainly used to this kind of behavior of bulk particles, these are tiny aluminum barrels containing nearly a trillion atoms.
Invisible connector
Both mechanical drums played a rhythm with no expectation between them, but nevertheless it turns out that they follow the invisible hand of the quantum conductor. In other words, they were intertwined.
According to Pinker, this finding basically shows that there is no fundamental boundary between our universe and the quantum world, a guess most physicists have always had. “You and I are quantum mechanical beings, only we are so large that you no longer notice those quantum effects.” According to the latest theories, the quantum forces of large objects rapidly seep away into the environment.
Sports wonder
By the way, Pinaker stresses, the research is much more than a physical drum record. “This can also have very useful applications,” he says. For example, you could use such a small drum as the main building block for a mechanical counterpart to a quantum computer, an arithmetic wonder that can solve some currently impossible sums at lightning speed in the future.
If practical, you should be able to read the information on such cylinders. But it should also be possible. So he writes A group of Finnish and Australian physicists in the same issue of Science. They also interlocked two quantum drums – incidentally slightly smaller samples – and showed that they could read the information hidden in their rhythms without destroying the fundamental quantum forces.
Usually, with such a measurement, Heisenberg’s uncertainty relationship throws a wrench into the works, a famous natural law that states that, for example, you can never know the exact position and velocity of an object at the same time. “But here the physicists used a hand trick and projected all these doubts on a third object,” says Benacere.
The first generation of quantum computers, already assembled in physics laboratories and by ICT giants such as Google and IBM, are digital devices. They calculate based on qubits, and the quantum versions of familiar zeros and ones in regular computers. “But these studies mean that you might also be able to analog quantum computers,” says Benacker. In this case, we may be more helpful in future maths with little things spinning, wobbling, or dancing.
