An important step towards a completely new experimental access to quantum physics has been made at University of Konstanz. The team of scientists headed by Professor Alfred Leitenstorfer has now shown how to manipulate the electric vacuum field and thus generate deviations from the ground state of empty space which can only be understood in the context of the quantum theory of light.
With these results, the researchers from the field of ultrafast phenomena and photonics build on their earlier findings, published in October 2015 in the scientific journal Science, where they have demonstrated direct detection of signals from pure nothingness. This essential scientific progress might make it possible to solve problems that physicists have grappled with for a long time, ranging from a deeper understanding of the quantum nature of radiation to research on attractive material properties such as high-temperature superconductivity. The new results are published on 19 January 2017 in the current online issue of the scientific journal Nature.
A world-leading optical measurement technique, developed by Alfred Leitenstorfer's team, made this fundamental insight possible. A special laser system generates ultrashort light pulses that last only a few femtoseconds and are thus shorter than half a cycle of light in the investigated spectral range. One femtosecond corresponds to the millionth of a billionth of a second. The extreme sensitivity of the method enables detection of electromagnetic fluctuations even in the absence of intensity, that is, in complete darkness. Theoretically, the existence of these "vacuum fluctuations" follows from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Alfred Leitenstorfer and his team succeeded in directly observing these fluctuations for the first time and in the mid-infrared frequency range, where even conventional approaches to quantum physics have not worked previously.
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