Not so Spooky—the Quantum Mechanics of Real Life

CETI Lab at PSU. FMH 218.

Dr. Jay Nadeau, Portland State University

Not so spooky—the quantum mechanics of real life”This talk explores how and why quantum mechanics was developed and where it may be going. Common phenomena, such as blackbody radiation and the heat capacity of solids, presented insurmountable problems to the classical view of the world. Quantum mechanics solved these enigmas by postulating that everything had both wave and particle properties.

Light is commonly thought of as a wave, but is also a massless particle (the photon). Massive particles, such as electrons, also have wave-like properties. The more massive the particle, the smaller the wavelength, so the harder it is to see the wave nature—nonetheless, everything is a wave if it can be studied at a small enough spatial scale. This wave-like nature of matter makes possible non-intuitive behaviors such as tunneling and entanglement. But far from being “spooky,” these behaviors enable technologies that we use in the lab and in everyday life, such as transistors and specialized microscopes.

The possibility of using quantum systems to encode information in “qubits” is the goal of quantum computation. Different types of quantum systems can serve as qubits, of which I present a few examples.

Prerequisites: All are welcome.

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