Quantum Gases Won’t Take the Heat
The quantum world blatantly defies intuitions that we’ve developed while living among relatively large things, like cars, pennies and dust motes. The quantum behavior of dynamical localization bucks the assumption that a cold object will always steal heat from a warmer object. Until now, dynamical localization has only been observed for single quantum objects, which has prevented it from contributing to attempts to pin down where the changeover occurs. JQI researchers and colleagues have investigated mathematical models to see if dynamical localization can still arise when many quantum particles interact. To reveal the physics, they had to craft models to account for various temperatures, interaction strengths and lengths of times. The team’s results, published in Physical Review Letters, suggest that dynamical localization can occur even when strong interactions are part of the picture.
Charting a Course Toward Quantum Simulations of Nuclear Physics
In nuclear physics, like much of science, detailed theories alone aren’t always enough to unlock solid predictions. There are often too many pieces, interacting in complex ways, for researchers to follow the logic of a theory through to its end. But simulations have helped researchers explore many challenging questions. Now, quantum simulators (which exploit quantum effects like superposition and entanglement) promise to bring their power to bear on many problems that have refused to yield to simulations built atop classical computers—including problems in nuclear physics. But to run any simulation, quantum or otherwise, scientists must first determine how to faithfully represent their system of interest in their simulator. They must create a map between the two.