Quantum Fluctuations Can Jiggle Objects on the Human Scale
"exec" writes:
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-human-scale.html
The universe, as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics, is a noisy, crackling space where particles blink constantly in and out of existence, creating a background of quantum noise whose effects are normally far too subtle to detect in everyday objects.
Now for the first time, a team led by researchers at MIT LIGO Laboratory has measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on objects at the human scale. In a paper published in Nature, the researchers report observing that quantum fluctuations, tiny as they may be, can nonetheless "kick" an object as large as the 40-kilogram mirrors of the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), causing them to move by a tiny degree, which the team was able to measure.
It turns out the quantum noise in LIGO's detectors is enough to move the large mirrors by 10-20 meters-a displacement that was predicted by quantum mechanics for an object of this size, but that had never before been measured.
Journal Reference:
Haocun Yu, L. McCuller, M. Tse, et al. Quantum correlations between light and the kilogram-mass mirrors of LIGO, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2420-8)
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