This control allowed the team to do something that Bohr and his contemporaries would have deemed impossible – controlling a quantum leap. Read more: The quantum world is infamously weird – now we might know why We should someday be able to do the same thing with real atoms, he says. “The fact that such a quantum jump was seen in a superconducting circuit rather than an atom is indicative of the fact that we can control this superconducting circuit in ways that we cannot control natural atoms,” says William Oliver at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On longer timescales, it’s impossible to predict when the next jump will occur, as Bohr thought – but on shorter timescales of just a few microseconds, they are. The lull in light from the atom is equivalent to those seismic warning signals.
“It’s a random phenomenon, no one can predict when the next volcano eruption will occur, however before the next eruption does occur there are certain signals in the ground that we can detect and use as a warning,” he says. Minev compares it to predicting a volcano eruption. The dark state was more stable than the bright state, so the atom would stay there for longer without emitting any photons.įrom these signals, the researchers were able to tell when a quantum jump had started by looking for a flash of light from the bright state followed by a lull as the atom leapt into the dark state. But if the atom absorbed a higher-energy photon from the beam, it would leap into the dark state.
Generally, the atom was rapidly bouncing between the ground state and the bright state, emitting a photon every time it jumped from bright to ground. They fired a beam of microwaves at the artificial atom to inject energy into the system. The researchers achieved this by building a superconducting electrical circuit with quantum behaviour that makes it an analogue to atom with three energy levels: the ground state, which is the atom’s default state, a “bright” state connected to the ground state, and a “dark” state into which the atom can jump. Read more: Einstein and Schrödinger: The price of fame
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