quantum physics

Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t appear to have. “First I thought I was wrong,” he said, “so I calculated again, and I checked…

It’s a radical view of quantum behavior that many physicists take seriously. “I consider it completely real,” said Richard MacKenzie, a physicist at the University of Montreal.But how can an infinite number of curving paths add up to a…

Intriguingly, this kind of decoherence will occur anywhere there is a horizon that only allows information to travel in one direction, creating the potential for causality paradoxes. The edge of the known universe, called the cosmological…

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the National Quantum Mission (NQM) with a total outlay of Rs 6,003.65 crore for the period 2023-24 to 2030-31 to scale up research and development and create an innovative ecosystem in quantum…

In classical physics, a vacuum is a total void—a true manifestation of nothingness. But quantum physics says that empty space isn’t really empty. Instead, it’s buzzing with “virtual” particles blipping in and out of existence too quickly to…

Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were…

Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naive calculations…

“There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.”Giddings has proposed a similar principle for ruling out paradoxical states…

When electrons couple up, further quantum trickery makes superconductivity unavoidable. Normally, electrons can’t overlap, but Cooper pairs follow a different quantum mechanical rule; they act like particles of light, any number of which…

Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit in or have a good reason not to.Unnaturalness is a problem. The poster child for unnatural is gravity. It has never played well with…