The question of where the boundary between classical and quantum physics lies is one of the longest-standing pursuits of modern scientific research and in new research published today, scientists demonstrate a novel platform that could help us find an answer.
The laws of quantum physics govern the behaviour of particles at miniscule scales, leading to phenomena such as quantum entanglement, where the properties of entangled particles become inextricably linked in ways that cannot be explained by classical physics.
Research in quantum physics helps us to fill gaps in our knowledge of physics and can give us a more complete picture of reality, but the tiny scales at which quantum systems operate can make them difficult to observe and study.
Over the past century, physicists have successfully observed quantum phenomena in increasingly larger objects, all the way from subatomic particles like electrons to molecules which contain thousands of atoms.
More recently, the field of levitated optomechanics, which deals with the control of high-mass micron-scale objects in vacuum, aims to push the envelope further by testing the validity of quantum phenomena in objects that are several orders of magnitude heavier than atoms and molecules. However, as the mass and size of an object increase, the interactions which result in delicate quantum features, such as entanglement, get lost to the environment, resulting in the classical behaviour we observe.
But now, the team co-led by Dr Jayadev Vijayan, Head of the Quantum Engineering Lab at The University of Manchester, with scientists from ETH Zurich, and theorists from the University of Innsbruck, have established a new approach to overcome this problem in an experiment carried out at ETH Zurich, published in the journal Nature Physics.
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