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CTOnews.com, March 2 (Xinhua) in the world of classical physics, walking from one side of a mountain to the other can only take physical effort to climb the mountain. But in the world of quantum physics, there is a kind of "through the wall", which is the quantum tunneling effect.

Physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria have observed this effect for the first time in experiments, which is the slowest charged particle reaction ever observed. It is said that such quantum events occur every 10 billion times.

It is difficult to predict the tunneling reaction in Pexels chemistry. It is difficult to accurately describe the chemical reaction of more than three particles by quantum mechanics, but it is almost impossible to describe the chemical reaction of more than four particles. Theorists can simulate these reactions in classical physics, but they must ignore the quantum effects. But what is the limit to the description of this classical chemical reaction, which can only provide approximate values?

Professor Roland Wester of the Department of Ion Physics and Applied Physics of the university has been trying to explore this frontier field for a long time. "it requires an experiment, can be measured very accurately, and can still be described by quantum mechanics," the experimental physicist said. " "I came up with this idea when I was talking to a colleague at a conference in the United States 15 years ago," he said, who wanted to track quantum tunneling in a very simple reaction.

After 15 years of research, he finally made an important breakthrough. The related paper was published in the latest issue of Nature on March 1, local time. DOI:10.1038/s41586-023-05727murz.

It is worth mentioning that the University of Innsbruck in Austria recently realized the entanglement of two ions at a distance of 230 meters through experiments. Trapping ions is said to be a promising platform for future quantum networks across cities and even continents, the study was also published in the journal physical Review KuaiBao.

Because the tunneling effect is almost impossible, the response is very slow, and the experimental observation becomes extremely difficult. However, after several attempts, the Wester team finally succeeded in doing so.

The Wester team chose to experiment with hydrogen, the simplest element in the universe. They introduce the hydrogen isotope deuterium into the ion trap, cool it, and then fill the ion trap with hydrogen. Because of the very low temperature, negatively charged deuterium ions lack energy to react with hydrogen molecules in the traditional way, but can react by collision in very rare cases.

(CTOnews.com Science Popularization: ion trap, also known as ion trap, its technical principle is to use the interaction between charge and electromagnetic field to restrain the motion of charged particles, and to use the two energy levels composed of the ground state and excited state of the confined ion as qubits, to manipulate the quantum state by microwave laser irradiation, and to initialize and detect the qubits by continuously pumping light and state-dependent fluorescence. Ion trap qubits can easily interact with more qubits)

When hydrogen molecules collide with charged deuterium atoms, this process of exchanging protons can be called tunneling, but this happens only once in 10 billion collisions.

"because of the nature of quantum mechanical waves, quantum mechanics allows particles to break through the energy barrier and react," explained Robert Wilder, lead author of the study. "We gave a possible reaction for about 15 minutes in our experiment. then determine the number of hydrogen ions formed. from their number, we can infer the frequency of the reaction."

It is worth mentioning that in 2018, theoretical physicists calculated that the quantum tunneling probability in this system is 1000 1/100000000. This is very consistent with the results now measured in Innsbruck, and after 15 years of research, human scientists have confirmed for the first time an accurate theoretical model of the tunneling effect in chemical reactions.

Of course, there are other chemical reactions that can also take advantage of the tunneling effect. However, this is the first time that scientists have observed the quantum tunneling effect, and this method of measurement has also been well understood in scientific theory. On this basis, researchers can build a simpler theoretical model of chemical reactions and test them on reactions that have been successfully proven.

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