ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010) — Science fiction has nothing over quantum physics when it comes to presenting us with a labyrinthine world that can twist your mind into knots when you try to make sense of it.
Researchers believe they've opened a door to a clearer view of how the common, everyday world we experience through our senses emerges from the ethereal quantum world. (Credit: iStockphoto)
Physicists call our familiar everyday environment the classical world. That's the world in which we and the things around us appear to have measurable characteristics such as mass, height, color, weight, texture and shape.
The quantum world is the world of the elemental building block of matter -- atoms. Atoms are combinations of neutrons and protons and electrons bound to a nucleus by electrical attraction.
But most of an atom -- more than 99 percent of it -- is empty space filled with invisible energy.
So from a quantum-world view, we and the things around us are mostly empty space. The way we experience ourselves and other things in the classical world is really just "a figment of our imaginations shaped by our senses," explains ASU Regents' Professor David Ferry.
For more than a century, scientists and engineers have struggled to come to a satisfactory conclusion about the missing link that bridges the classical and quantum worlds and enables a transition from that world of mostly empty space to the familiar environment we experience through our senses.
One proposed scenario based on these questions was investigated in a dissertation written by Adam Burke to earn his doctorate in electrical engineering in 2009 from ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.
To try working out an answer to some of the questions, Burke teamed with Ferry, a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Tim Day, who recently earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from the school, physicist Richard Akis, an associate research professor in the school, Gil Speyer, an assistant research scientist for the engineering schools' High Performance Computing Initiative, and Brian Bennett, a materials scientist with the Naval Research Laboratory.
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Periodic Scarred States in Open Quantum Dots as Evidence of Quantum Darwinism
Abstract
1School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering and Center for Solid State Electronics Research, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-5706, USA
2High Performance Computing Initiative, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-8906, USA
3Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. 20375, USA
Received 20 November 2009; published 27 April 2010
Scanning gate microscopy (SGM) is used to image scar structures in an open quantum dot, which is created in an InAs quantum well by electron-beam lithography and wet etching. The scanned images demonstrate periodicities in magnetic field that correlate to those found in the conductance fluctuations. Simulations have shown that these magnetic transform images bear a strong resemblance to actual scars found in the dot that replicate through the modes in direct agreement with quantum Darwinism.
© 2010 The American Physical Society
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.176801
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.176801
PACS: 73.23.-b, 03.65.Ta, 03.65.Yz, 73.63.Kv
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COMENTÁRIO IMPERTINENTE DESTE BLOGGER:
Darwinismo quântico? Gente, eu pensei que já tinha visto de tudo. Realmente, Darwin foi o homem que teve a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve: embora em Física o que conta são as leis e as constantes, o princípio de seleção natural resolve o paradoxo da física clássica e da física quântica.
Gente, embabascado como Huxley, eu me pergunto, ou teria sido Einstein? -- Como que eu não pensei nisso antes? Einstein, meu velho, você quebrou o côco à toa, pois Darwin já tinha resolvido este problema da Física clássica e da Física Quântica já em 1859.
Fui, nem sei por que, pensando que a Física que está sendo praticada ultimamente está mais para metafísica (não seria alquimia???) do que 'ciência dura'.
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