Dance of quantum twisters
11 Jan 2013 by Evoluted New Media
A quantum fluid trapped on top of a semiconductor chip can be used to measure movements remarkably precisely. Tornado-like vortexes can be produced in fluids which are controlled by quantum mechanics.
Research published in Nature Communications details how massed ranks of these quantum tornados line up in rows. The research conducted at Cambridge University paves the way for engineering quantum circuits and chips to measure motion to astonishing precision.
The team at NanoPhotonics Centre have managed to create and control hundreds of tiny twisters on a semiconductor chip. The researchers can control where electrons move and how they interact with light to create a particle that combines the properties of electrons and photons. The new quantum particle has been dubbed a ‘polariton’
Dr Natalia Berloff from the theoretical quantum fluids group said: “Being half-light and half-matter these particles are feather-light and move quickly around, sloshing and cascading much like water in a mountain river.”
These quantum systems are comparatively large (the width of a human hair) and the effects can be seen through a normal optical microscope.
The team, led by Berloff and Professor Jeremey Baumberg, has been able to achieve many unexpected movements with the liquid on the chip’s surface: forcing it to flow up and down “hills” to form both “quiet lakes” and “wildly raging quantum oceans”.
By creating polaritons at the tops of several hills and letting them flow downhill the team was able to form regular arrays of hundreds of twisters spiralling in alternating directions along well-defined canyons. Changing the number of hills, the distance between them and the rate of polariton creation enabled the researchers to vary the separation, size and number of twister cores allowing them to control macroscopic quantum states.
The team say their findings may have exciting future applications for quantum engineering:
“This work lays groundwork for new generation of ultra-sensitive gyroscopes to measure gravity, magnetic field, and create quantum circuits,” Berloff told Laboratory News.
Geometrically locked vortex lattices in semiconductor quantum fluids
