Swiss physicists were able to understand the quantum nature of vacuum using laser pulses.
What is empty space at the quantum level? It is very difficult to understand this. All existing methods of quantum measurements are based on the absorption of energy by detectors. But vacuum is the lowest energy state of space. Trying to measure it is like trying to measure the force of an immobile fist.
But physicists from the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich seem to have managed to cope with this task. Instead of trying to capture energy from the void, they decided to reveal the effect of vacuum on photons. To do this, scientists fired a laser pulse lasting trillionths of a second through a supercooled crystal, and tried to understand how the empty space between the atoms of the crystal changes the movement of particles.
By comparing laser pulses passed through the crystal at different locations and under different conditions, the scientists were able to capture what they called "vacuum signals." “In truth, the signal we measured is absolutely tiny, and we really had to twist very much to make the most of our experimental capabilities in measuring very small fields,” commented physicist Jerome Festus.
To understand that the captured signal is not the noise of the instruments and not the measurement error, physicists had to carry out trillions of observations. But now they have no doubts - this is really a signal of the vacuum, and it is capable of influencing elementary particles. Well, it looks like "absolute nothing" is not nothing at all, as scientists used to think.