When the wave packets of multiple Rydberg atoms interact, complex “fingerprints” emerge that are somewhat analogous to the choppy waters of colliding ripples in a pond. In the macro-scale world that humans experience, it’s impossible to be in two places at once, or to simultaneously exist in two different realities, but such mind-boggling feats are possible under the weird quantum rules that exist on the very small scales of atoms and subatomic particles. These packets emerge from a quantum phenomenon called superposition, in which an object can occupy two states of reality at the same time. Scientists use Rydberg atoms to study all kinds of interesting problems in physics, but the new study focuses on the unpredictable signatures, called “wave packets,” produced by excited electrons that orbit the atoms. The team created this quantum watch by shooting lasers at helium atoms until they reached an excited “Rydberg'' state with special properties. We were even more surprised when we realized that the theory was able to find flaws in the experiment.” which is referred to in the study as the “drift of the delay stage.” When we compared the results of the experiment with the simulations we were surprised to see that they match extremely well. “The idea came after the experiments were done at the stage of data analysis. “We knew that we would see quantum beats but we did not think of the fact that it could be a quantum watch,” she continued. "In the beginning, nobody was even thinking about such a cool concept as the quantum watch,” Berholts recalled, because the project was simply focused on studying the dynamics of electrons triggered by ultrashort laser pulses. The outbreak left her with “a lot of time to spend in a laser lab in a foreign country,” she noted. This differentiation comes from the fact that the quantum watch, unlike all the other clocks, measures times in a different way.”īerholts stumbled upon this mind-boggling concept while during her postdoctoral project at Uppsala University, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. “All other devices require keeping track of time. ![]() “The quantum watch provides a fingerprint representing a specific time, and hence only requires interaction when initiating and reading out the time,” she explained. ![]() She added that the new invention is a watch, not a clock, because “a clock requires keeping track of time” whereas “a watch simply provides the time.” “To our knowledge, the concept of obtaining time fingerprints, and therefore avoiding the need to measure time zero, is completely novel,” Berholts said in an email. Now, a team led by Marta Berholts, an experimental physicist at Tartu University, have created a very different type of “quantum watch” that "does not require an initial “time zero” reference point to make its time measurements, according to a recent study in Physical Review Research.
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