World News Trust World News Trust
World News Trust World News Trust
  • News Portal
  • All Content
    • Edited
      • News
      • Commentary
      • Analysis
      • Advisories
      • Source
    • Flatwire
  • Topics
    • Agriculture
    • Culture
      • Arts
      • Children
      • Education
      • Entertainment
      • Food and Hunger
      • Sports
    • Disasters
    • Economy
    • Energy
    • Environment
    • Government
    • Health
    • Media
    • Science
    • Spiritual
    • Technology
    • Transportation
    • War
  • Regions
    • Africa
    • Americas
      • North America
      • South America
    • Antarctica
    • Arctic
    • Asia
    • Australia/Oceania
    • Europe
    • Middle East
    • Oceans
      • Arctic Ocean
      • Atlantic Ocean
      • Indian Ocean
      • Pacific Ocean
      • Southern Ocean
    • Space
  • World Desk
    • Submit Content
  • About Us
  • Sign In/Out
  • Register
  • Site Map
  • Contact Us
  • The Techno-Feudal Method to Musk’s Twitter Madness | Yanis Varoufakis
  • Wars Aren’t Won with Peacetime Economies | Joseph E. Stiglitz
  • Strangers Behind the Trees: On the Death of Rayan Suliman and His Fear of Monsters | Ramzy Baroud
  • The Stagflationary Debt Crisis Is Here | Nouriel Roubini
  • How to Green Our Parched Farmlands & Finance Critical Infrastructure | Ellen Brown
  • From Great Moderation to Great Stagflation | Nouriel Roubini
  • The Road to Fascism: How the War in Ukraine is Changing Europe | Ramzy Baroud

The 'secret' movement of quantum particles | David Arvidsson-Shukur

More items by author
Categories
Edited | Front Page Stories | All Content | Education | Energy | Science | North America | Europe | News | News -- WNT Selected
Tool Bar
View Comments

Credit: Robert Couse-BakerCredit: Robert Couse-Baker

Dec. 22, 2017 (Phys.org) -- Researchers from the University of Cambridge have taken a peek into the secretive domain of quantum mechanics.

In a theoretical paper published in the journal Physical Review A, they have shown that the way that particles interact with their environment can be used to track quantum particles when they're not being observed, which had been thought to be impossible.

One of the fundamental ideas of quantum theory is that quantum objects can exist both as a wave and as a particle, and that they don't exist as one or the other until they are measured. This is the premise that Erwin Schrödinger was illustrating with his famous thought experiment involving a dead-or-maybe-not-dead cat in a box.

"This premise, commonly referred to as the wave function, has been used more as a mathematical tool than a representation of actual quantum particles," said David Arvidsson-Shukur, a Ph.D. student at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, and the paper's first author. "That's why we took on the challenge of creating a way to track the secret movements of quantum particles."

Any particle will always interact with its environment, 'tagging' it along the way. Arvidsson-Shukur, working with his co-authors Professor Crispin Barnes from the Cavendish Laboratory and Axel Gottfries, a Ph.D. student from the Faculty of Economics, outlined a way for scientists to map these 'tagging' interactions without looking at them. The technique would be useful to scientists who make measurements at the end of an experiment but want to follow the movements of particles during the full experiment.

(more)

READ MORE: Phys.org

back to top
  • Created
    Friday, December 22 2017
  • Last modified
    Saturday, December 23 2017
  1. You are here:  
  2. Home
  3. All Content
  4. Edited
  5. The 'secret' movement of quantum particles | David Arvidsson-Shukur
Copyright © 2023 World News Trust. All Rights Reserved.
Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License.