Physicists Have Looked Into "complete Emptiness" And Proved That There Is Something In It - Alternative View

Physicists Have Looked Into "complete Emptiness" And Proved That There Is Something In It - Alternative View
Physicists Have Looked Into "complete Emptiness" And Proved That There Is Something In It - Alternative View

Video: Physicists Have Looked Into "complete Emptiness" And Proved That There Is Something In It - Alternative View

Video: Physicists Have Looked Into "complete Emptiness" And Proved That There Is Something In It - Alternative View
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According to quantum mechanics, vacuum is not just empty space. In fact, it is filled with quantum energy and particles, tiny particles constantly appearing and disappearing just like that, leaving behind a trail in the form of signals that we call quantum fluctuations. For decades, these fluctuations existed only in our quantum theories, until in 2015 researchers announced that they had directly detected and determined them. And now the same team of scientists claims that they have advanced in their research much further - they were able to manipulate the vacuum itself and determine the changes in these mysterious signals from the void.

Here we enter the territory of high-level physics, but more importantly, if the results of the experiment that we will talk about today are confirmed, then it is quite possible that this will mean that scientists have discovered a new way of observing, interacting and practical tests of quantum reality without interfering with her. The latter is especially important, since one of the biggest problems of quantum mechanics - and our understanding of it - is that every time we try to measure or even simply observe a quantum system, we will destroy it by this influence. As you can imagine, this does not really fit with our desire to find out what is really going on in this quantum world.

And it is from this moment that the quantum vacuum comes to the rescue. But before moving on, let's briefly recall what a vacuum is from the point of view of classical physics. Here he represents a space completely devoid of any matter and containing energies of the lowest magnitudes. There are no particles here, which means that nothing can interfere or distort pure physics.

One of the conclusions of one of the most fundamental principles of quantum mechanics - the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - sets a limit to the accuracy of observation of quantum particles. Also, according to this principle, the vacuum is not empty space. It is filled with energy, as well as pairs of antiparticle particles that appear and disappear at random. These particles are "virtual" rather than physically material, which is why you cannot detect them. But even though they remain invisible, like most objects in the quantum world, they also affect the real world.

These quantum fluctuations create randomly fluctuating electric fields that can act on electrons. And it is thanks to this effect that scientists first indirectly demonstrated their existence in the 1940s.

Over the following decades, this remained the only thing we knew about these fluctuations. However, in 2015, a group of physicists led by Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany said they were able to directly determine these fluctuations by observing their effect on a light wave. The results of the scientists' work were published in the journal Science.

In their work, the scientists used short-wave laser pulses lasting only a few femtoseconds, which they sent into a vacuum. Researchers began to notice subtle changes in the polarization of light. According to the researchers, these changes were directly caused by quantum fluctuations. The result of the observations will surely cause controversy more than once, but the scientists decided to take their experiment to a new level by "compressing" the vacuum. But this time, too, they began to observe strange changes in quantum fluctuations. It turns out that this experiment not only turned out to be another confirmation of the existence of these quantum fluctuations - here we can already talk about the fact that scientists have discovered a way to observe the course of an experiment in the quantum world without affecting the final result,which in any other case would destroy the quantum state of the observed object.

“We can analyze quantum states without changing them on the first observation,” comments Leitenstorfer.

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Typically, when you want to trace the effect of quantum fluctuations on a particular particle of light, you first need to detect and isolate these particles. This, in turn, will remove the "quantum signature" of these photons. A similar experiment was carried out by a team of scientists in 2015.

As part of the new experiment, instead of observing changes in quantum fluctuations by absorbing or amplifying photons of light, the researchers observed the light itself in terms of time. It may sound strange, but in a vacuum, space and time work in such a way that observing one immediately allows you to learn more about the other. Making such an observation, the scientists found that when the vacuum was "compressed", this "compression" occurred exactly the same as it happens when a balloon is compressed, only accompanied by quantum fluctuations.

At some point, these fluctuations became stronger than the background noise of the uncompressed vacuum, and in some places, on the contrary, they were weaker. Leitenstorfer gives an analogy of a traffic jam moving through a narrow space of the road: over time, cars in their lanes occupy the same lane to squeeze through the narrow space, and then go back to their lanes. To a certain extent, according to the observations of scientists, the same happens in a vacuum: the compression of a vacuum in one place leads to a distribution of changes in quantum fluctuations in other places. And these changes can either accelerate or slow down.

This effect can be measured in space-time, as shown in the graph below. The parabola in the center of the image represents the point of "compression" in vacuum:

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Image

The result of this compression, as can be seen in the same image, is some "subsidence" in the fluctuations. No less surprising for scientists was the observation that the level of power of fluctuations in some places was lower than the level of background noise, which, in turn, is lower than that of the ground state of empty space.

"Since the new measurement method does not involve the capture or amplification of photons, there is the possibility of directly detecting and observing the electromagnetic background noise in a vacuum, as well as controlled deviations of states created by the researchers," the study says.

Researchers are currently testing the accuracy of their measurement method and trying to figure out what it can actually do. Despite the already more than impressive results of this work, there is still a possibility that scientists have come up with a so-called "unconvincing method of measurement", which, perhaps, is capable of not violating the quantum states of objects, but at the same time is not able to tell scientists more about one or another quantum system.

If the method does work, then scientists want to use it to measure the "quantum state of light" - the invisible behavior of light at the quantum level that we are just beginning to understand. However, further work requires additional verification - replication of the results of the discovery of a team of researchers from the University of Constance and thereby demonstrating the suitability of the proposed measurement method.

NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK

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