Category: Weird ‘n’ spooky
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The surprise at the bottom of the infinite quantum well
Who remembers the quantum particle trapped in an infinite square well? Ya’ll probably still havin nightmares about it. Turns out there is an interesting new take on this problem that has physicists all a-sea. For any bods out there who ain’t familiar with it, the simplest problem in any course of quantum mechanics is this:…
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Einstein’s revenge over spooky action at a distance
One o’ the most bewilderin’ parts of quantum mechanics is its spooky action at a distance. Einstein couldn’t fathom it and other physicists have been a-puzzlin on it for decades. Today they gotta lil more to fret ‘n’ fuss about. Alexandre “Napkin” Matzkin at the Universite Joseph-Fourier in Grenoble has found a serious problem with…
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Quantum metamaterials: the next generation of superweird stuff
Ya’ll heard about metamaterials–that stuff they made invisibility cloaks outta at Duke University last year. It’s mighty strange stuff and it’s about to get a lot weirder in a quantum kinda way. Metamaterials get their properties from their structure rather than their composition. So chuck a few capacitors, inductors and wires into an eggbox and…
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Quantum RAM
If yer gonna build a quantum computer, yer gonna need some quantum memory to store qubits. Enter quantum random access memory–which like most quantum things is just like plain old vanilla RAM except all a-ghostly and a-spooky. Brrrrr. Here’s how RAM works. Each memory cell is connected to a circuit tree in which the branches…