Physicists Levitated a Glass Nanosphere, Nudging It Into The Realm of Quantum Mechanics
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Loading... - Beverly Garcia
- 28 Mar 2023
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Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can't explain.
In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are constantly attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.
Back in 2021, a team succeeded with a tiny glass nanosphere that was 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
To our minds that's very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it's actually rather huge, made of up to 10 million atoms.
Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics was a huge achievement. Using carefully calibrated laser lights, the nanosphere was suspended in its lowest quantum mechanical state, one of extremely limited motion where quantum behavior can start to happen.
"This is the first time that such a method has been used to control the quantum state of a macroscopic object in free space," said Lukas Novotny, a professor of photonics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, back in July 2021.
To achieve quantum states, movement and energy must be dialed right down. Novotny and his colleagues used a vacuum container cooled down to -269 degrees Celsius (-452 degrees Fahrenheit) before using a feedback system to make further adjustments. Read More…
