14 DAY TRIAL // By intersecting a laser beam with a stream of atoms inside a copper box, researchers at the Rice University are able to excite atoms to a level where they become almost as large as the dot at the end of a sentence. This allowed them to emulate the behavior of the Trojan asteroids in our solar system.
These space rocks are organized into two clouds, which travel around the Sun under the combined gravitational influences of the star and the gas giant Jupiter. As evidenced in the video below, one Trojan cloud precedes Jupiter in orbit, whereas the other follows it.
The Rice group, in collaboration with colleagues from the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), in Austria and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in the US, recently managed to simulate the asteroids' paths and behaviors with electronic states around an atomic nucleus.
One of the main reasons why this work is fascinating is because the interactions that take place between atoms, or between the elementary particles making up an atom, are usually subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, whereas now the team is using them to simulate Newtonian interactions.
The entire field of quantum mechanics spawned from the necessity to explain phenomena that the theories of Newton and Einstein could not make sense of. As a byproduct of the new experiments, the team also demonstrated that Newton's classical laws of motion are also applicable at the atomic scale.
Furthermore, they were able to show this by using a single atom of potassium. Details of the way in which researchers, Barry Dunning, Brendan Wyker and Shuzhen Ye, set up their experiments were published in this week's issue of the esteemed journal Physical Review Letters.
The team says that their study also demonstrates a prediction made by the father of quantum mechanics, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, back in 1920. Their approach, which involves simulating Jupiter's gravitational field through an oscillating electric field, produced electronic states that orbited the atomic nucleus just like the Trojans do around the Sun.
“The level of control that we're able to achieve in these atoms would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and has potential applications in, for example, quantum computing and in controlling chemical reactions using ultrafast lasers,” Dunning explains.
The new investigation was made possible through the support of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund and the Department of Energy (DOE).
