Pendulum Swinging Nonstop for Five Days ⚡ экспресс
Experiments to determine the boundary between quantum and classical physics require extreme isolation from the environment. A superconducting milligram-scale oscillator operating at millikelvin temperatures with record-low dissipation is presented: the decay time exceeds 110 hours, corresponding to a resonance linewidth of less than 0.8 μHz. The experimental setup is easily tunable and compatible with adiabatic nuclear demagnetization, promising even lower temperatures. The device's capabilities are demonstrated by measuring the resistance from ³He impurities in superfluid ⁴He at a level of ~10⁻⁸ with a force on the order of femtonewtons. This work is an important step toward creating nearly closed systems to test quantum gravity effects and wave function collapse.
A tiny ball weighing a fraction of a milligram, suspended in a magnetic field and cooled to near absolute zero, oscillates for 110 hours without stopping—this is record isolation. The energy loss is so small that the system's entropy barely increases, making any external influence noticeable.
The pendulum already sensed nudges from single atoms of helium-3 in superfluid helium—the force was femtonewtons, less than the weight of a bacterium divided by a billion. Inspired by Schrödinger's paradoxes, physicists hope to test spacetime curvature effects at the quantum level—to see how a macroscopic object behaves like an elementary particle.
🎯 Superfluid helium can spontaneously leave an open cup—it simply flows over the edge, ignoring gravity, like a living creature.