Physics
IN QUANTUM mechanics, the whole can be much greater than the sum of its parts, according to new calculations. They suggest that several low-energy quantum states could be combined into a state with regions that are dozens of times more energetic than any of the constituent components.
One of the more shocking revelations of quantum mechanics is that every object can be viewed as a wave if the circumstances are just right – and the mathematics of what it means to be a wave hides many oddities. Andrew Jordan at Chapman University in California and his colleagues have uncovered a new way to leverage some of those oddities to make quantum states that should have very little energy but actually have a lot.
Their idea builds on the work of Yakir Aharonov, also at Chapman University, who co-authored the new study. In the 1990s, he and his colleagues discovered a phenomenon called “superoscillations”. Any wave, from a vibrating guitar string to a wave of light, can be decomposed into several constituent sinusoidal waves, each of which wiggles with some frequency. Aharonov and his colleagues found that if they zoomed in on only one small region of the main wave, on rare occasions the sum of its constituent waves would add up to wiggle much faster than the main wave’s fastest part – forming a superoscillation.
This may not seem surprising, but Jordan says it can have unexpected consequences. For instance, it means that you should be able to take a wave of red light, which has a relatively low frequency, and find a region of it that vibrates at a higher frequency, making it look blue instead – a phenomenon that was observed in experiments. Now, Jordan has expanded the idea to other quantum “super behaviours” by taking advantage of the wave nature of quantum objects.
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