My PhD thesis has been published!
If you're interested in how to manipulate atoms into their coldest possible state using lasers, and why it's interesting to drop them in a 10m vacuum tower, this is for you! Also, fun with "painting" arbitrary shapes with laser beams! #physics#AtomInterferometry#Quantum#QuantumSensing https://doi.org/10.15488/17346
In #QuantumFieldTheory, scattering amplitudes can be computed as sums of (very many) #FeynmanIntegral s. They contribute differently much, with most integrals contributing near the average (scaled to 1.0 in the plots), but a "long tail" of integrals that are larger by a significant factor.
We looked at patterns in these distributions, and one particularly striking one is that if instead of the Feynman integral P itself, you consider 1 divided by root of P, the distribution is almost Gaussian! To my knowledge, this is the first time anything like this has been observed. We only looked at one quantum field theory, the "phi^4 theory in 4 dimensions". It would be interesting to see if this is coincidence for this particular theory and class of Feynman integrals, or if it persists universally.
More background and relevant papers at https://paulbalduf.com/research/statistics-periods/ #quantum#physics#statistics
How quantum physics could 'revolutionise everything'
Growing up on a farm in Australia, Liam Hall was a mechanic "getting greasy, scraped knuckles", but in recent years his career has taken a more technical turn.
He's now the head of quantum biotechnology at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.
Here is a curious finding from our statistical analysis https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16217 :
A #Feynmangraph is a graphical short hand notation for a complicated integral that computes the probability for scattering processes in #quantum field theory.
An electrical circuit can also be described as a graph. What happens if we interpret the Feynman graph as an #electrical network, where each edge is a 1 Ohm resistor? We can then compute the resistance between any pair of vertices and collect all these values in a "resistance matrix", as shown below. The average of all these resistances is called "Kirchhoff index". Now it turns out that this average resistance is correlated fairly strongly with the Feynman integral of that graph: A graph with large contribution to quantum scattering amplitudes on average also has a large electrical resistance. Isn't that a nice connection between two seemingly distinct branches of theoretical #physics ?
Born on this day: #physicist J. R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). While best remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project, he was a giant of 20th century theoretical physics, nominated for a Nobel 3 times.
In 1927 he & Max Born greatly simplified how we predict electrons behaviour within atoms. The Born-Oppenheimer or adiabatic approximation is based on the observation that electrons are 1000s times lighter than nuclei, 🧵1/n
The Love for #C64 computers never ceases. #IBM quantum computing Code is running here, which experiment claims the C64 outperforms the IBM #qbit#Quantum computer
It makes total sense (securing data is critical) but it's still funny to me that several of the key players in the Quantum Safe space are also the ones building the #quantum computers 😁 #OSSummit
@Luke#quantum#entanglement collapse can be partial. So the observer may continue to exist in both worlds, more initially and then less and less entangled across parting worlds. Fiction makes this out to be longer than scientist like to believe. However, we know highly organized biological structures can work against entropy and hence put bounds around spontaneous total decoherence. I was writing something when I saw your note and took an excursion... into the rabbit hole. Luckily rabbits build multiple exits to their burrows...
#PhotoOfTheDay: Niels Bohr and Max Planck photographed in front of a chalkboard, around 1930.
The two are considered pioneers of #Quantum#Mechanics and two of the founders of quantum theory, each receiving a #NobelPrize in Physics for their work on quantum theory.
Sending photons to a remote site in groups should allow #quantum links to be more rapidly established across future quantum networks than if photons are sent one at a time.
Now Ben Lanyons Team has more than doubled the success rate for sending photons that are quantum mechanically entangled with atoms to a distant site, reports David Ehrenstein in @physics_magazine: