Physics simulations using classical mechanics is something that’s fairly easily done on regular consumer hardware, with real-time approximations a common feature in video games. Moving things to the quantum realm gets more complex, though with equilibrium many-body systems still quite solvable. Where things get interesting is with nonequilibrium quantum systems. These open systems are subject […]
As part of his multi-year project to build a quantum computer, hacakday.io poster [skywo1f] has shared with us his most recent accomplishment — a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer, which he built for less than $100. The NMR spectrometer is designed to disturb protons, which naturally line up according to the Earth’s magnetic field, using an […]
The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had redone the experiment for himself. In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but […]
Within our comfortable world of causality we expect that reactions always follow an action and not vice versa. This why the recent chatter in the media about researchers having discovered ‘negative time’ with photons being emitted before the sample being hit by source photons created such a stir. Did these researchers truly just crack our […]
Photons are particles of light, or waves, or something like that, right? [Mithuna Yoganathan] explains this conundrum in more detail than you probably got in your high school physics class. While quantum physics has been around for over a century, it can still be a bit tricky to wrap one’s head around since some of […]
If quantum physics always sounded a little squirrelly to you, take heart. Yale researchers have announced that they can do what quantum physics claimed to be impossible: they can determine the state a quantum system will collapse to before it happens. This contradicts Schrodinger’s famous hypothetical cat that is superimposed as 50% alive and 50% […]