quantum mechanics
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What Is a Quantum Battery? And When Will It Power My Laptop?
The modern battery has come a long way in its 224-year history. In the place of Alessandro Volta’s piles of metal disks and brine-soaked cloth, we now have batteries the dimensions of a graham cracker that can last days before needing a recharge. But what is the ceiling of the devices currently on the market?…
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Physicists Just Learned Something Major About the Proton
Physics at the smallest scales is a challenge of observation: Particles are often fleeting, and the forces that govern their behaviour are nearly imperceptible. But now, by exploiting decades-old data and a 50-year-old prediction about gravity’s import on subatomic particles, a team of physicists has teased out a measurement for a second mechanical property in…
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Scientists Tried to Quantum Entangle a Tardigrade
A group of physicists recently placed a microscopic animal known as a tardigrade onto a superconducting qubit, in an attempt to mingle the realms of quantum and classical mechanics. The researchers argue that the tardigrade was entangled at a quantum level, but some scientists say the team’s claims go beyond what they actually achieved.
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Mirrors That Detect Ripples in Space-Time Were Frozen to Near Absolute Zero
A team of physicists say they’ve managed to nearly freeze the motion of atoms across four suspended mirrors. It’s a mind-twisting feat that strains the very definitions of seemingly simple words like “object” and “temperature.” So buckle up.