Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the U.S. shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising clever laboratory experiments that made it possible to control ghostly quantum particles, an achievement that many theoretical physicists believed could never be done. The work has already led to the creation of clocks more than 100…
Albert Einstein mockingly called it “spooky action at a distance”: the finding that quantum particles can influence each other regardless of how far apart they are. We can only imagine his horror at a new experiment that extends the idea to time by entangling a pair of photons that never coexisted. As well as expanding…
One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B…
An international team of physicists has pushed the boundaries on ultra-precise measurement by harnessing quantum light waves in a new way. It is one thing to be able to measure spectacularly small distances using “squeezed” light, but it is now possible to do this even while the target is moving around. An Australian-Japanese research collaboration…
The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside….
How many scientists does it take to author a study on the Higgs boson particle? Around 6,000. Two articles by the teams at CERN, about 30 pages each, include 19 pages of single-spaced text with roughly 6,000 names of researchers who peer-reviewed the results of the experiments, making the discovery of the elusive God particle…
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is in part an embodiment of the idea that in the quantum world, the mere act of observing an event changes it. But the idea had never been put to the test, and a team writing in Physical Review Letters says “weak measurements” prove the rule was never quite right. That…
Every day we observe systems thermalizing: Ice cubes in a pot of hot water will melt and will never remain stable. The molecules of the ice and the molecules of the water will reach thermal equilibrium, ending up at the same temperature. Well-ordered ice crystals turn into a disordered liquid. Recent experiments have shown that…
An international team of researchers has published their paper demonstrating quantum teleportation between two Canary Islands. While quantum teleportation doesn’t lead to instantaneous communication, what it does lead to is incredibly secure communications. That’s because no matter what instructions the sender sends over normal communications channels, those instructions are completely useless without the receiver’s entangled…
The most significant breakthrough in the laser pulse field in four years provides scientists with a new tool to watch quantum mechanics in action — a world hidden from view until now. The work was also accomplished without using specialized equipment, such as a mile-long particle accelerator or Superdome-sized synchrotron. University of Central Florida professor…