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Scientists Just Created Massive Schrödinger Cat States · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: I want you to imagine an absolutely impossible scenario for
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: a second. You are standing right in front of a thick,
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: solid brick wall, and you have a tennis ball in
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: your hand.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Okay, I'm picturing it.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: You wind up and you throw the ball as hard
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: as you can right at the center of the wall.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: But instead of bouncing back, it just passes right through.
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: Right which completely defies every instinct you have about how
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: the physical world operates.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Exactly doesn't break the bricks, it doesn't leave a hole.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: It just slips through the solid barrier and materializes on
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: the other side completely intact.
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, solid objects crashing into solid objects should result in
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: a bounce or well a break.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Or imagine a slightly different scenario. A cat is placed
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: inside a sealed box, and inside that box is a
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: device that has exactly a fifty percent chance of triggering
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: and ending the cast life.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: Ah, the classic thought experiment.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: Right and until you open that box and look inside.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: That cat isn't just potentially alive or potentially dead. According
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: to the strange rules of the universe, it is simultaneously
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: alive and completely dead at the very same time.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: Because we rely on the universe forcing a choice, but
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: at a fundamental level, the universe refuses to choose until
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: it's directly observed.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: And these aren't just wild science fiction concepts. These are
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: foundational principles of physics. But for a long time, we
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: thought these bizarre reality bending rules only applied to the
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: incredibly tiny sub atomic world.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the realm of the invisible.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Right until now. Because as scientists at the Southern University
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: of Science and Technology and the Quantum Science Center of Guangdong,
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Hong Kong, Macaw, Greater Bay Area have just achieved this
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  Speaker 2: mind bending breakthrough.
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  Speaker 3: It really is massive pun intended.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they have successfully created massive Schrodinger cat states using
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: ultra cold atoms.
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  Speaker 3: Which means they are forcing heavy atomic clusters to do
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  Speaker 3: things that historically only single, nearly massless particles could pull off.
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  Speaker 2: It's wild.
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  Speaker 3: It fundamentally challenges where we draw the line between the
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: quantum world and the everyday physical reality you experience.
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  Speaker 2: So we're talking about forcing groups of heavy atoms to
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: perform quantum tunneling all at once, which bridges the gap
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  Speaker 2: between the weird quantum realm and the macroscopic world you
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: and I and habit I mean, this could completely revolutionize
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: our technology and our entire understanding of gravity. Okay, let's
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: unpack this.
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  Speaker 3: To really grasp the magnitude of what this research team,
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  Speaker 3: led by physicist Bingyang, has actually accomplished, we have to
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: ground ourselves in those two weird ws of.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Reality superposition and quantum tunneling.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: Right, those are the engines driving this entire breakthrough.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: Well, let's start with superposition, which is basically the heart
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: of that whole cat in the box scenario.
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  Speaker 3: So, quantum mechanics is the physics framework that describes how
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: matter and energy behave at the most extreme microscopic scales,
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: and one of the most counterintuitive effects predicted by these
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  Speaker 3: laws is superposition.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Right, where things can be in two places at once Exactly.
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  Speaker 3: It dictates that particles like electrons or photons can exist
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: in multiple states or even multiple physical positions simultaneously, so.
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  Speaker 2: They aren't in one place or the other. They're literally
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: in this blurry state of all of the above.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, their reality is essentially a probability wave until they
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: are measured or observed. The moment they interact with an
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: observer or a measuring device, that wave collapses.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, so they are forced to pick a single state precisely.
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  Speaker 3: Irwin Schudinger actually designed his famous cat paradox to show
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  Speaker 3: how absurd this concept feels when you scale it up
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  Speaker 3: to the human level.
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  Speaker 2: Because if a single atoms decay dictates whether the lethal
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: device in the box goes off, and that atom is
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  Speaker 2: in a blurry superposition of both decayed and not decayed.
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  Speaker 3: Then logically the device is both triggered and untriggered.
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  Speaker 2: Right. The cat is therefore forced into a macroscopic superposition.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it becomes a Schrodinger cat state, behaving as if
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  Speaker 3: it is into completely contrasting mutually exclusive states at once.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so superposition explains the blurry states. But how does
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  Speaker 2: that blurry wave actually get through a solid barrier without
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: breaking it? I mean that brings us to condom tunneling.
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  Speaker 3: Right, the tennis ball going through the brick wall.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: In classical physics, if you don't have enough energy to
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  Speaker 3: overcome a barrier, you just don't get past it.
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  Speaker 2: Makes sense.
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  Speaker 3: But in quantum mechanics, because particles act like those blurry
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  Speaker 3: probability waves we just mentioned, there is always a tiny,
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  Speaker 3: non zero probability that the particle will simply exist on
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  Speaker 3: the other side of a solid energy barrier.
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  Speaker 2: Wait, so it just tunnels through even though it absolutely
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  Speaker 2: lacks the energy to do so. Yes, let me uh,
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: let me try to visualize this. If we think about
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: classical physics, it's like rolling a heavy boulder up a
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  Speaker 2: very steep hill. If you don't push hard enough to
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: get it all the way over the peak, it just
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: rolls back down to where you started. You failed to
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  Speaker 2: overcome the barrier.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly classical physics, as you're stuck.
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  Speaker 2: But quantum tunneling is like you give the boulder a
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  Speaker 2: weak little push and it just magically teleports through the
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  Speaker 2: solid center of the hill to the other side.
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  Speaker 3: Well, let's refine that teleportation idea because it's not quite magic.
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  Speaker 3: It actually has to do with how waves function. Okay,
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: I'm tracking imagine that boulder isn't solid rock, but a
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  Speaker 3: dense fog. When the fog hits the hill, it doesn't
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  Speaker 3: just stop instantly. Its edges blur and seep into the soil.
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  Speaker 3: In quantum mechanics, a particle's location is a probability distribution.
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  Speaker 3: It has no hard, definitive edges. The wave smears into
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  Speaker 3: the barrier, so.
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  Speaker 2: It's literal smearing into the wall.
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  Speaker 3: Right and if the barrier's thin enough, little piece of
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  Speaker 3: that smeared wave extends out the other side. When the
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  Speaker 3: wave collapses, the particle has a chance of popping into
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  Speaker 3: existence on that far side.
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  Speaker 2: It just seeps through the cracks of reality. But wait,
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  Speaker 2: I'm looking around the room right now. I've never seen
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: a baseball seep through a bat and I've never seen
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  Speaker 2: a person smear through a closed door. Doesn't this teleportation
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  Speaker 2: trick only work for incredibly tiny, lightweight things like single electrons.
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  Speaker 3: That observation right there sets up the monumental scientific hurdle
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  Speaker 3: that Bing Yang and his team decided to take on
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  Speaker 3: because size is the defining limitation of quantum weirdness. Okay,
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  Speaker 3: there is a strict textbook rule in physics regarding quantum tunneling.
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  Speaker 3: The probability of a particle successfully tunneling through a barrier
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  Speaker 3: decreases exponentially as its mass increases.
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  Speaker 2: Exponentially, so it hits a wall incredibly fast. It's not
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  Speaker 2: just a gradual slope exactly.
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  Speaker 3: Electrons, which have virtually no mass, tunnel effortlessly. I mean,
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  Speaker 3: modern electronics, the computer chips and the device you're using
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  Speaker 3: to listen to this right now rely on electron tunneling
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  Speaker 3: to function.
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  Speaker 2: Wow, I didn't realize that.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, But move up to a proton, which is significantly
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  Speaker 3: heavier than an electron, and the tunneling probability rapidly becomes negligible.
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  Speaker 3: It really struggles a tunnel at all.
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  Speaker 2: And atoms are made of multiple protons and neutrons, so
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  Speaker 2: they are massively heavier than the single electron.
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  Speaker 3: You're right, making atomic tunneling incredibly rare and difficult to achieve,
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  Speaker 3: which is why bing Yang was driven by a very specific,
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  Speaker 3: ambitious question.
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  Speaker 2: What was it?
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  Speaker 3: He asked? Can we push quantum tunneling to much larger,
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  Speaker 3: potentially macroscopic objects?
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  Speaker 2: But wait, if the math dictates that tunneling strength drops
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  Speaker 2: off a cliff the heavier something gets, aren't we just
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  Speaker 2: fighting an impossible mathematical law of nature?
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  Speaker 3: It definitely seems that way.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, how do you even begin to trick physics
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  Speaker 2: into letting a whole cluster of atoms tunnel together. It
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: feels like trying to make a bowling ball act like
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  Speaker 2: a single photon.
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  Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is the why behind this seemingly possible task.
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  Speaker 3: Making a heavy quantum state is absolutely vital for fundamental physics.
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  Speaker 2: Vital.
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  Speaker 3: How well, we have two incredibly successful frameworks for understanding
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  Speaker 3: the universe. Quantum mechanics perfectly explains the tiny stuff, and
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  Speaker 3: general relativity perfectly explains gravity and the massive stuff.
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  Speaker 2: Oh right, and they famously hate each other exactly.
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  Speaker 3: They are completely unreconciled. General relativity relies on space and
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  Speaker 3: time being smooth and continuous, like a perfectly stretched rubber sheet. Okay,
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  Speaker 3: but quantum mechanics says everything is chunky, blurry and based
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  Speaker 3: on probabilities. Gravity just doesn't make sense on a quantum level,
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  Speaker 3: and quantum superposition doesn't make sense on a planetary scale.
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  Speaker 2: So they're completely incompatible right now.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, but by creating massive spatial superposition states heavy Schrodinger
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  Speaker 3: cat states, we create a laboratory where these two worlds
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  Speaker 3: are forced to overlap. We create a route to study
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  Speaker 3: the direct interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity.
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  Speaker 2: Oh wow, so the motivation is huge. They're literally trying
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  Speaker 2: to solve the biggest mystery in modern physics. But we
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  Speaker 2: still have that hurdle, the exponential suppression of tunneling with mass.
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  Speaker 2: So how do they beat an impossible mathematical law?
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  Speaker 3: Well, they had to completely reinvent how atoms are grouped
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  Speaker 3: together and manipulated. They couldn't use normal atoms at room temperature.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so what do they use?
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  Speaker 3: The entire experiment hinges on utilizing ultra cold atoms.
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  Speaker 2: We're talking temperatures cool down to near absolute zero. But
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: why does the temperature actually matter?
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  Speaker 1: Here?
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  Speaker 3: Extreme cold slows the atoms down so much that their
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  Speaker 3: quantum behavior becomes prominent. Temperature is basically just a measurement
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  Speaker 3: of how fast particles are moving, right.
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  Speaker 2: Like hot water boiling versus ice.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly, a hot atom is jittering around rapidly. It acts
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  Speaker 3: mostly like a distinct, hard little particle. Freezing it down
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  Speaker 3: to near absolute zero steals all that jittery energy. Okay,
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  Speaker 3: makes sense, And this increases something called their de broadly wavelength.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, I've heard that term debro lee wavelength. Yeah, what
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  Speaker 2: is it actually mean for the atom? Though?
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  Speaker 3: It means the atoms wave nature spreads out it becomes fuzzier, fuzzy. Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: Instead of acting like a tiny hard marble, it acts
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  Speaker 3: more like a broad, rippling puddle.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, So they took these super chilled, spread out puddle atoms.
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  Speaker 2: Where do they put them?
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  Speaker 3: They trapped them inside what are called optical lattices. You
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: can think of an optical lattice as an artificial microscopic
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  Speaker 3: trap made entirely out of crisscrossing laser beams.
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  Speaker 2: Whoa.
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  Speaker 3: It creates a landscape of peaks and valleys, essentially energy barriers.
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  Speaker 2: And wells, like an egg carton made of cure light.
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  Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. The lasers separate
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  Speaker 3: the system into these tiny, double well units. Now, the
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  Speaker 3: natural instinct if you want a bunch of atoms to
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  Speaker 3: tunnel together as one heavy object might be to bind
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  Speaker 3: them together as tightly as.
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  Speaker 2: Possible, right, to glue them into one solid chunk so
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  Speaker 2: they don't break apart during the journey.
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  Speaker 3: But if you do that, you run right back into
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: the mass problem. You just created a heavy boulder, and
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  Speaker 3: the math says the boulder can't.
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  Speaker 2: Tunnel, oh right, because it's too heavy.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly, So, the researchers decided to group seven atoms together
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  Speaker 3: into a cluster. Crucially, instead of tightly binding them, they
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  Speaker 3: used relatively weak binding interactions.
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  Speaker 2: Weak binding.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, the connections between the atoms were much smaller than
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: the height of the energy barrier they were choked across.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, here's where it gets really interesting, because the way
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  Speaker 2: they solve this is completely counterintuitive.
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  Speaker 3: It really is.
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  Speaker 2: It's like imagine a group of seven people trying to
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  Speaker 2: slip through a dense, nearly impassable crowd at a concert. Okay,
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  Speaker 2: if those seven people tie themselves tightly together into a massive,
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  Speaker 2: rigid knot, they're going to get completely stuck. They become
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  Speaker 2: a big, heavy object that can't maneuver.
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 2: But if they just loosely hold hands and carefully coordinate
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  Speaker 2: their steps, tuning their interactions with each other, they can
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  Speaker 2: weave through the barrier of the crowd together as a
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  Speaker 2: single fluid object.
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  Speaker 3: That's spot on. Because they were weakly bound the matter
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: wave packet, that fuzzy quantum identity of the cluster was
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: prevented from shrinking dramatically as they added more particles. The
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: cluster maintained its broad wave nature.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Okay, so they loosely hold hands, they stay a big
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: blurry wave. But being a big blurry wave doesn't magically
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: push you through a solid wall. How did they actually
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: force them through?
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: To do that, they tune what are known as interaction
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  Speaker 3: controlled high order tunneling processes. Okay, and they pushed this
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  Speaker 3: all the way up to the seventh order in the experiment.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: We're getting into heavy jargon territory here. Seventh order interaction
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  Speaker 2: controlled high order tunneling processes. What does that actually mean
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: for the seven atoms?
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  Speaker 3: Think of it as a highly synchronized seven step quantum dance.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: A quantum dance.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, they used magnetic fields to carefully adjust how much
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: the atoms naturally repel or attract each other. That's the
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: interaction controlled part.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Oh.
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  Speaker 3: See, By dialing in the perfect amount of interaction, they
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  Speaker 3: set up a chain reaction. Atom one shifts slightly, which
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: changes the energy landscape for atom two, pulling it along,
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  Speaker 3: which perfectly sets up atom three and so on.
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  Speaker 2: It's not seven individual atoms trying to crash through a
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: wall simultaneously.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: No, not at all. It is a highly coordinated seven
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  Speaker 3: part sequence where the movement of one atom essentially paves
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: the way for the next.
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  Speaker 2: They're just passing the momentum through.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: The group exactly, and by finally tuning this sequential dance
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: within the laser trap, they achieved something phenomenal. The massive
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: seven atom cluster was able to tunnel through the barrier
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: with the exact same strength and efficiency as a single
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: solitary atom.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Wait, really, they completely bypass the exponential suppression. It did
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: They tricked the math by making the heavy cluster act
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: like a perfectly coordinated ghost. That's amazing it is.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: As the cluster tunnel through the barrier, it generated a
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: spatial quantum superposition, a massive Schrodinger cat state existing in
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: multiple positions within the double well units simultaneously.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, so we've established how they did thing impossible, Seven
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: loosely bound atoms cool to absolute zero carefully tuned in
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: an egg carton of light to slide through a solid
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: barrier as one synchronized wave.
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  Speaker 3: As stunning achievement in fundamental physics.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: Truly, So what does this all mean? How does this
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: laboratory breakthrough actually change the world outside the lab?
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: It changes things dramatically when we look at practical applications,
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: specifically a field called atom interferometry.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Atom interferometry essentially using the wavelike nature of atoms to
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: measure things precisely.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: Because atoms have mass, they are incredibly sensitive to environmental forces.
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: Atom interferometers use these atomic waves to measure motion, time,
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: and gravity with astonishing precision. Okay, Currently, though, conventional atom
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: interferometers rely on single particles. Because of that, they are
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: capped by a hard ceiling in physics known as the
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: standard quantum limit.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: Ah, so there's only so much precision you can squeeze
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: out of a single atom. I mentioned a single atom
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: is pretty easy to jostle around.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Very easy. Single atoms are subject to statistical noise. If
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: you flip a coin once, you don't get a clear
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: picture of probability. You need a larger sample size to
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: reduce the noise.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: It makes total sense.
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: If you use a blurry ruler, you can only get
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: an estimate of a room's length. But by using these
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: new massive schrodermer cat states entire clusters of atoms acting
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: as a single quantum wave, we can smash right through
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: that standard limit. Smash through it to what we could
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: reach what is known as Heisenberg limited sensitivity.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Heisenberg limited sensitivity. That sounds intense. What does it look like?
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: In the real world.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: It is the absolute maximum precision that the fundamental laws
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: of quantum mechanics will allow.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: The ultimate ceiling.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the ultimate ceiling of measurement. Because you have a
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: heavy cluster of atoms acting as one wave, the statistical
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: noise drops dramatically. The sensitivity scales up with the number
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: of particles in the cluster. Wow, you go from measuring
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: the room with a blurry ruler to using a laser
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: guided microscope gopic caliber.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: I mean imagine having sensors so precise, so flawlessly attuned
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: to the universe that they could perfectly map hidden underground
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: resources right from the surface.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: You can find deeep aquifers of water or rare mineral
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: deposits just by detecting the microscopic, almost imperceptible differences in
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: gravitational pull from the rocks below.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: It's completely possible.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: Or imagine navigation systems for submarines or spacecraft that instantly
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: detect the most infinitesimal shifts in Earth's gravity. You could
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: have perfect positioning without any need for GPS satellites, all
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: just by watching how these massive atomic clusters behave in
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: a state of superposition.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: The precision becomes almost unfathomable, and the researchers even noted
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: that during the experiment they observed unexpected quantum phenomena like
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: what like long lived, strongly interacting states among the particles.
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: It suggests there's a whole new layer of complex many
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: body physics to explore here. Really just scratching the surface.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: And Binging and his team are not stopping at seven atoms,
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: not at all.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: Their stated goal is to scale this system size up substantially.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: They want to move from this few particle regime to
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: one hundred atoms, and eventually they want to scale this
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: toward Bose Einstein condensates, which.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Are super cooled clouds of matter that behave entirely as
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: a single quantum.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: Entity, right containing up to one hundred thousand atoms ten
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: to the fifth power.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: One hundred thousand atoms tunneling through a barrier as a
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: single massive shroding your cat state. That is mind boggling.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: And if we connect this to the bigger picture, reaching
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: one hundred thousand atoms is where the truly profound questions
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: get answered. How So at that mass we could finally
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: tangibly probe how gravity actually interacts with macroscopic quantum matter
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: waves because gravity couples directly to mass. Right, one hundred
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: thousand atoms have enough collective mass that gravitational forces become
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: a significant measurable variable in their quantum behavior. Couldn't really
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: watch quantum mechanics and gravity shake hands in real time.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: It is incredible. I mean, we started this conversation talking
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: about a tennis ball bouncing off a brick wall, and
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: we've walked through an absolute paradigm shift.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: We really have.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: These scientists recognized an inherent limit in nature, the exponential
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: suppression of tunneling, and they figured out how to cleverly
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: bypass it. They took us from single, nearly massless electrons
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: smearing through barriers to entire coordinated seven atom clusters slipping.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: Through together a coordinated quantum dance.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and in doing so, they have paved the way
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: for the ultimate precision sensors, unlocking a completely new way
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: to measure the forces shaping our reality.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: It really forces us to reconsider the boundaries of that reality,
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: which leaves you with a truly profound question to ponder today.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: Lay it on me.
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: If this team successfully scales this up from seven atoms
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: to one hundred to one hundred thousand. Where does the
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: weirdness actually stop?
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Does it stop?
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: Well, if a massive cluster of one hundred thousand atoms
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: can be forced to exist in a spatial superposition, could
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: we do it with a million? Could something the size
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: of a grain of sand be in two places at once?
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: With a wild thought, at what exact measurable point does
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: the bizarre rule breaking quantum world snap into the predictable, rigid,
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: classical world you see around you every day.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Where exactly is the boundary where the tennis ball finally
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: hits the wall and bounces
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: Back, Because right now, it seems that boundary might be
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: entirely up to us