Tag: quantum measurement
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Squeezing light to detect more gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article appeared in the fall print issue of Popular Science, but I missed that this article had also been published online. Something called ‘squeezed light’ is about to […]
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O, what entangled photons we weave!
(OK, it doesn’t scan. So sue me.) Quantum entanglement is a challenging topic, and one which has tripped up a lot of people (including many physicists!) over the decades. In brief, entanglement involves two (or more) particles constituting a single system: measurement on one particle instantly determines the result of similar measurements on the second, […]
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Studying electron motion in space and time
I really love how many experiments are beginning to probe to the limits of quantum measurement. I wrote about a pair of cool studies in December that revealed the quantum wavefunction — the mathematical structure governing the behavior of particles. Today, my latest article in Ars Technica examined a proposed experiment using X-ray lasers to […]
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Disentangling environmental influences in photon-atom interactions
Often in physics, we can separate the object from the environment and the experimental apparatus from what’s being measured, but that separation is approximate. In quantum systems, those distinctions break down, to the point where the environment “measures” the system, in ways we don’t fully understand even after nearly a century of study. (A lot […]
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Playing a quantum shell game to win
The shell game is a classic con, a rigged contest meant to separate a person from their money. The quantum shell game described in a new paper is meant to elucidate the role of measurement in the outcome of an experiment, separating the quantum and classical aspects clearly. This was accomplished using measurement of the […]
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Trapping particles leads to 2012 Nobel Prize in physics
The the winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics were announced this morning: Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland. Their work involves trapping and measuring the quantum states of photons and ions, respectively: A major challenge is measuring the state of a quantum system without modifying it. On the macroscopic scale, we can generally […]
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