Quantum Physics - Blog Posts
MIT discovers a new state of matter, a new kind of magnetism
“Really, though, the most exciting thing about quantum spin liquids is that they’re completely new, and thus we ultimately have no idea how they might eventually affect our world. “We have to get a more comprehensive understanding of the big picture,” Lee says. “There is no theory that describes everything that we’re seeing.””
In the Alice in Wonderland world of the atomically small, things can be in two places at once, merely looking at a particle can alter a twin on the other side of the universe apparently instantaneously, and theoretical cats can be both alive and dead.
Certainty is also somehow replaced by chance, an idea that once moved a somewhat vexed Albert Einstein to famously say: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
Such strange, almost magical effects have always been confined to the world of photons and atoms – until now.
In the journal Nature, scientists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Colorado reported the first “glimpses” of quantum effects, as they are known, happening on a scale just large enough to be seen by the human eye.
It is a breakthrough that could have significant implications for attempts to create quantum computers that are many millions of times faster than the current machines.
One of the researchers, Dr John Teufel, told the Independent: “I think we’re in an extremely exciting time where this technology we have available gives us access to things people have been talking about as thought experiments for decades.
“Just now what’s exciting is we can go into the laboratory and actually witness these quantum effects.”
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