News tagged with quantum
Two stopped light pulses interact with each other
(Phys.org) -- For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated the interaction of two motionless light pulses. Because the stopped light pulses have a long interaction time, it increases the ...
May 08, 2012 |
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Does the quantum wave function represent reality?
(Phys.org) -- At the heart of quantum mechanics lies the wave function, a probability function used by physicists to understand the nanoscale world. Using the wave function, physicists can calculate a system's ...
Apr 25, 2012 |
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Quantum dot LEDs get brighter, more efficient
(Phys.org) -- While quantum dot-based light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) are not made of organic materials, they share many of the same advantages as organic LEDs (OLEDs). For instance, both QLEDs and OLEDs outshine ...
Nanotechnology / Nanomaterials
Apr 20, 2012 |
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Trade-off coding for quantum communication provides more benefits than previously thought
(Phys.org) -- In optical communication systems, the overall performance depends on the strategy used to transmit photons from one location to another. In previous attempts to optimize this performance, scientists ...
Apr 16, 2012 |
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143 is largest number yet to be factored by a quantum algorithm
(Phys.org) -- While factoring an integer is a simple problem when the integer is small, the complexity of factorization greatly increases as the integer increases. When the integer grows to more than 100,000 ...
Apr 11, 2012 |
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Physicists search for new physics in primordial quantum fluctuations
(PhysOrg.com) -- Inflation, the brief period that occurred less than a second after the Big Bang, is nearly as difficult to fathom as the Big Bang itself. Physicists calculate that inflation lasted for just ...
Mar 26, 2012 |
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Researchers engineer molecular magnets to act as long-lived qubits
(PhysOrg.com) -- Some physicists today are investigating the possibility of using molecular magnets as information storage units in future quantum computers. Molecular magnets are molecules whose magnetic ...
Mar 21, 2012 |
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Quantum strategy offers game-winning advantages, even without entanglement
(PhysOrg.com) -- Quantum correlations have well-known advantages in areas such as communication, computing, and cryptography, and recently physicists have discovered that they may help players competing in ...
Mar 13, 2012 |
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Why we've got the cosmological constant all wrong
(PhysOrg.com) -- Some scientists call the cosmological constant the "worst prediction of physics." And when today’s theories give an estimated value that is about 120 orders of magnitude larger than the ...
Mar 05, 2012 |
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Keeping it together: Protecting entanglement from decoherence and sudden death
(PhysOrg.com) -- Decoherence can be metaphorically seen as a quantum fall from grace: When quantum bits, or qubits, are in superposition – such as a single qubit simultaneously having both 1 and 0 values ...
Feb 27, 2012 |
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Fast photon control brings quantum photonic technologies closer
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using photons instead of electrons to transmit information could lead to faster and more secure ways to communicate, among other advantages. Now a team of physicists has taken another step toward realizing ...
Feb 13, 2012 |
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Repulsive gravity as an alternative to dark energy (Part 2: In the quantum vacuum)
(PhysOrg.com) -- During the past few years, CERN physicist Dragan Hajdukovic has been investigating what he thinks may be a widely overlooked part of the cosmos: the quantum vacuum. He suggests that the quantum vacuum has ...
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Study supports role of quantum effects in photosynthesis
(PhysOrg.com) -- Until a few years ago, photosynthesis seemed to be a straightforward and well-understood process in which plants and other organisms use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars, ...
Jan 25, 2012 |
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Proposed experiment offers new way to generate macroscopic entanglement
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the development of quantum information processing, one of the key requirements is achieving quantum entanglement. But recently, physicists have been investigating other forms of quantum correlations besides ...
Jan 05, 2012 |
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Physicists propose test for loop quantum gravity
(PhysOrg.com) -- As a quantum theory of gravity, loop quantum gravity could potentially solve one of the biggest problems in physics: reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics. But like all tentative ...
Jan 03, 2012 |
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Quantum
In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is an indivisible entity of a quantity that has the same units as the Planck constant and is related to both energy and momentum of elementary particles of matter (called fermions) and of photons and other bosons. The word comes from the Latin "quantus", for "how much." Behind this, one finds the fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized", referred to as "quantization". This means that the magnitude can take on only certain discrete numerical values, rather than any value, at least within a range. There is a related term of quantum number.
A photon is often referred to as a "light quantum". The energy of an electron bound to an atom (at rest) is said to be quantized, which results in the stability of atoms, and of matter in general. But these terms can be a little misleading, because what is quantized is this Planck's constant quantity whose units can be viewed as either energy multiplied by time or momentum multiplied by distance.
Usually referred to as quantum "mechanics", it is regarded by virtually every professional physicist as the most fundamental framework we have for understanding and describing nature at the infinitesimal level, for the very practical reason that it works. It is "in the nature of things", not a more or less arbitrary human preference.
For more information about Quantum, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
