14 DAY TRIAL // A group of scientists at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, announces the creation of an advanced type of semiconductor chip. They say that this device is capable of converting electrons into a type of quantum state that acts at a large-enough scale to become visible to the naked eye.
The newly formed quantum state is also capable of emitting light, and comes in the form of a quantum superfluid. Researchers with the study team say that one of the immediate applications for the new creation is in developing ultra-sensitive detectors.
Details of the research effort were published in a paper that appeared in the January 8 issue of the esteemed journal Nature Physics. The work provides an account of how quantum states were made visible at a large scale.
Physicists are used to meeting quantum mechanical effects only in the case of interactions between very tiny particles. Even if the objects interacting are really small, they also have to be at extremely low temperatures for this effect to occur.
In order to synthesize super-sized quantum particles, the Cambridge team had to mix electrons and photons together, producing human-hair-thick superconducting particles that were in a quantum state. The human eyes can easily see the width of a human hair.
The team named their new particles polaritons. The latter were produced when light was trapped in small structures placed around the electrons within the chip. Without adding photons, the mix would not have worked, the team explains.
Working together with Greek colleagues, Cambridge experts Dr. Gab Christmann, professor Jeremy Baumberg and Dr. Natalia Berlof were recently able to observe the interesting behavior of polaritons.
One way to conduct such studies is to insert some of these particles between two laser spots. Once the light beams were turned on, the team immediately observed the formation of quantum pendulum states, which occurred when the quantum fluid began oscillating back and forth.
“These polaritons overwhelmingly prefer to march in step with each other, entangling themselves quantum mechanically,” Christmann explains. “This is not something we ever expected to see directly, and it is miraculous how mirror-perfect our samples have to be,” he concludes.
The investigation was sponsored by the European Union and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).