Cosmic Rhythm: From Snowdrifts to Quantum Gas ⚡ экспресс
For the first time, physicists have observed universal Family–Vicsek scaling (where surface roughness changes according to power laws) in a quantum system – a one-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice. By measuring particle number fluctuations in half of the system, they extracted all critical exponents and showed that the entire relaxation process is described by a single universal function. It's as if crystal growth and quantum fluctuations were following the same script. This discovery bridges nonequilibrium universality across classical and quantum systems.
A snowdrift grows by strict rules: falling snowflakes form bumps, those attract more snow, and the bumps amplify. The same mathematics describes city growth, patterns on bark, ripples on water, and clusters of cosmic dust. Physicists call this uniformity universality.
Scientists created a 'quantum snowdrift'—a cloud of cold atoms trapped in laser beams. Using a method similar to photometry (measuring brightness to count particles), they tracked how bumps grow on this snowdrift. It turned out that the buildup of disorder, or entropy, and the saturation moment exactly replicate the classical scenario.
The boundary between the quantum and familiar world is blurring: even atoms 'sculpt' shapes familiar from snowy yards. Surprisingly, this universal scale was first noticed not in nature, but in a 1980s computer model of falling pixels. The ideas of Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein about unusual states of matter, as well as the work of Ludwig Boltzmann on the birth of order from chaos, find a direct continuation here.
🎯 The Family-Vicsek scale was first noticed in computer simulations of random particle deposition in the 1980s.