A Recipe for Quantum Experiments: Don't Forget a Thing
A quantum computer is like a finicky musical instrument: the slightest change in temperature, humidity, or string tuning, and the melody sounds different.
How Conservation Laws Conduct the Particle Orchestra
A billiard ball strikes another, and the sum of their velocities before and after the collision obeys strict rules. The same happens in the microscopic world: energy, momentum, and charge cannot simply vanish.
Causality: Why It Can't Be Measured
The quantum world plays a strange game with causality. If in everyday life salt is always added to soup before serving, here the ingredients end up in the bowl at the same time, and the chef doesn't remember the order. Physicists asked: can we measure this 'recipe'? The answer is no.
Light and a Particle Tangled in a Dance
On a lab bench sits a laser trap — an invisible hand that holds a glass bead the size of a bacterium in midair. Next to it is a mirrored cavity where light bounces between two reflective walls. Scientists made the bead and the light exchange quantum entanglement: their states are now linked so that measuring one instantly reveals the other.
Machine Learns to See the Hidden
When a top quark is born in a particle detector, it immediately decays into a shower of other particles. Catching a hint of new physics in that shower is like hearing a whisper at a rock concert. You need not just a good microphone, but the ability to subtract the roar of the amplifiers and the hum of the crowd.
A Quantum Network as a Gravitational Laboratory
On an ordinary optical table, amid lasers and mirrors, a cloud of a hundred strontium-87 atoms begins to live by the laws of curved spacetime. Half a second later, its quantum interference fades: gravitational time dilation destroys the superposition.
Pilot droplets: a new look at quantum reality
In the quantum world, particles do not have precise properties until they are measured. The official model refuses to explain what lies behind this uncertainty. But the idea that invisible 'pilots' control particles has been around since the 1920s.