Quantum Matter tagged posts

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have become the first to experimentally observe a quirky behavior of the quantum world: a “quantum boomerang” effect that occurs when particles in a disordered system are kicked out of their locations. Instead of landing elsewhere as one might expect, they turn around and come back to where they started and stop there.

“It’s really a fundamentally quantum mechanical effect,” said atomic physicist David Weld, whose lab produced the effect and documented it in a paper published in Physical Review X. “There’s no classical explanation for this phenomenon.”

Scientists find twisting 3D Raceway for Electrons in Nanoscale Crystal Slices

Mysterious quantum properties in material point to new applications in electronics. Researchers have created an exotic 3D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a nanomaterial they fabricated at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) The international team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Germany observed, for the first time, a unique behavior in which electrons rotate around one surface, then through the bulk of the material to its opposite surface and back.

The possibility of developing “topological matter” that can carry electrical current on its surface without loss at room temperature has attracted significant interest in the research communit...

Quantum systems consisting of many particles can enter highly intricate states with strong so-called multiparticle entanglement. A new-found theoretical relation now allows extracting it with standard tools available in scattering experiments. Credit: IQOQI/Ritsch

New Protocol to detect Entanglement of Many-Particle Quantum states has been developed. These systems could help us not only to improve our understanding of matter but to develop measurement techniques beyond current existing technologies. Entanglement is a consequence of the probabilistic rules of quantum mechanics and seems to permit a peculiar instantaneous connection between particles over long distances that defies the laws of our macroscopic world – a phenomenon that Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.”

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Schematic illustration of the experiment. An initial density modualtion is imprinted onto the ultracold atoms held in the optical lattice potential (1). Without any disorder, the density modulation is washed out completely in the ensuing dynamics, indicating relaxation towards a thermal equilibrium state (2). In the presence of sufficiently strong disorder, the researchers find that even for long evolution times the system retains memory of the initial state, indicating a non-thermal state in which the system remains stuck (3). Credit: M. Schreiber, LMU

Using ultracold atoms trapped in light crystals, scientists have observed a novel state of matter that never thermalizes...