Physics Nobel Awarded for Measuring Quantum Particles

On the second day of Nobel Prize week, the award in physics went to American David J. Wineland and Frenchman Serge Haroche for quantum measurement techniques.

Down at the tiny level of subatomic particles, the laws of quantum mechanics, rather than classical physics, run the show. Classical physics can explain a beam of light or a current of electricity, but not the smaller pieces, called quantum particles, that make up the current or the beam. It was believed impossible to observe or manipulate a single quantum particle without destroying it, until Wineland and Haroche independently developed ways to do so.

Wineland, of the University of Colorado in Boulder, captured ions?positive or negative charged atoms?in a harmonic trap and measured them with photons. The seeds of this idea were planted in the 1970s, and Wineland demonstrated the method in 1986.

In 1990, Haroche theorized a way to measure the number of photons in a cavity by observing their interactions with atoms. He achieved the feat in 2007.

This is the second Nobel in as many days to be awarded for bringing a longstanding theory into practice. (Yesterday?s medicine prize went to researchers who figured out hot to turn already-developed cells into pluripotent stem cells.) The measurements of Wineland and Haroche could be the jumping off point for making other quantum theories, like quantum computing, a reality.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/physics-nobel-awarded-for-measuring-quantum-particles-13541439?src=rss

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