Physicists in Australia and Britain have reshaped quantum uncertainty to sidestep the restriction imposed by the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle - a result that could underpin future ultra-precise sensor technology used in navigation, medicine and astronomy.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, introduced in 1927, says that you can't know certain pairs of properties - such as a particle's position and momentum - with unlimited precision at the same time. In other words, there is always a trade-off in uncertainty: the more closely one property is pinned down, the less certainty there is about the other.
In research published Sept. 24 in Science Advances, a team led by Dr Tingrei Tan from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics has shown how to engineer a different trade-off to precisely measure position and momentum at the same time.
"Think of uncertainty like air in a balloon," said Dr Tan, a Sydney Horizon Fellow in the Faculty of Science. "You can't remove it without popping the balloon, but you can squeeze it around to shift it. That's effectively what we've done. We push the unavoidable quantum uncertainty to places we don't care about (big, coarse jumps in position and momentum) so the fine details we do care about can be measured more precisely."
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