Posted on 3/26/2019, 3:55:45 AM by BenLurkin
To investigate Faraday waves, the team confined BECs to a linear one-dimensional waveguide, resulting in a cigar-shaped BEC. The researchers then shook the BECs using a weak, slowly oscillating magnetic field to modulate the strength of interactions between atoms in the 1D waveguide. The Faraday pattern emerged when the frequency of modulation was tuned near a collective mode resonance. But the team also noticed something unexpected: When the modulation was strong and the frequency was far below a Faraday resonance, the BEC broke into "grains" of varying size. Rice research scientist Jason Nguyen, lead co-author of the study, found the grain sizes were broadly distributed and persisted for times even longer than the modulation time.
"Granulation is usually a random process that is observed in solids such as breaking glass, or the pulverizing of a stone into grains of different sizes," said study co-author Axel Lode, who holds joint appointments at both TU Wien and the Wolfgang Pauli Institute at the University of Vienna.
Images of the quantum state of the BEC were identical in each Faraday wave experiment. But in the granulation experiments the pictures looked completely different each time, even though the experiments were performed under identical conditions.
Lode said the variation in the granulation experiments arose from quantum correlations—complicated relationships between quantum particles that are difficult to describe mathematically.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
I think I’ve had one of them quantum splinters before. Nasty buggers.
Is there any practical application other than appeals for more grant money?
More grant money is about as practical as possible to get! ( if you’re the recipient, of course).
BECs are about where lasers were in maybe 1970. They are one of the many scientific breakthroughs that will have a tortuous path to practical application, but it will happen eventually.
And when they get to that point, the results will be as incredible to people at that time as the CD-ROM, fiber optics, terabyte communication channels, 3D printing, and all the rest have been to our generation.
It took about 50 years between the first indication of the interesting things that govern the flow of electric charge through large crystal structures and the development of the first integrated circuits. The strange phenomena that caught the imagination of those who explored the behavior of galena crystals as AM RF demodulators back in the 1920s led to the transistor, the IC chip, the semiconductor laser, the microprocessor, the internet, and a changed world.
BECs and some of the other way-out things that are developing in physics and chemistry are going to push society in unimaginable directions.
Link that with breakthroughs in genetics and computer science, and the world of Kirk, Spock and Bones is not far off.
This experiment confirms that quantum fluctuations are truly random.
Potentially, quantum computers will be able to produce real random numbers.
Feynman diagrams.
Thanks as always for posting.
You won’t like this, but the only splinters I am interested in are those I remove with a needle from my fingers.
Millions of practical applications.
“Lode said the variation in the granulation experiments arose from quantum correlations—complicated relationships”
Young the Giant wrote the solution to this dilemma:
“Why don’t we rely on chemistry? Why don’t we collide the spaces that divide us?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxJhrwyn0M4
Probably figured this out while waiting for the cough syrup to go down.
I am thinking that the necessity to cool something below 2 Kelvins is going to be a serious practical limitation.
Where you been, boy? That is OK, new to me too.
News to me also.
I refuse to be impressed until some space jockey flies in close to, and gets gravity assist from, a series of galaxies, one after another after another.
The future should be better than the past.
Yeah, I get all this, but why are we on Daylight Savings Time.
Various splinter groups are just stringing us along with speculations in order to qualify for grants. What a bunch of bozons!/s
“Matter waves and quantum splinters: Physicists shatter Bose-Einstein condensate, get different pieces every time”
T repeat a question...U no, chicken or egg stuff///
Which came first?? MATTER or SPACE ?
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