Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In the latest progress in physics, physicists have realized the experiment of extracting energy from vacuum. This is a feat that seems to run counter to the laws of physics and common sense.

In the eyes of theoretical physicist William William Unruh, the traditional perception of physics is this: "you can't extract energy directly from a vacuum because there is nothing to provide there."

But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, suggested that a vacuum might actually extract energy.

At first, many researchers ignored the work, believing that it was impossible to extract energy from the vacuum. However, those who have scrutinized the idea realize that Mr Horida is proposing a quantum mechanics approach that is slightly different from previous cognition. This energy is not obtained out of thin air; it must be achieved by dissipating energy from distant space. From this point of view, Horida's idea looks less like the creation of energy out of thin air, more like the transfer of energy from one place to another, a strange but less unacceptable idea.

"the idea was beyond our expectation," Enru said. He has worked with Hiroshi Horida, but has not been involved in the study of energy transfer. "A very ingenious result he found."

In the past year, researchers have been able to transfer energy across microscopic distances in two ways, proving Horida's theory. These studies prove that energy transfer is a newly discovered quantum phenomenon.

"this experiment validates Horida's theory," said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist who was not involved in the study. "this technology does achieve energy transfer and energy extraction."

The first person in Quantum Credit to study the teleportation of quantum energy was Horida himself. In 2008, Horida was looking for a way to measure the strength of quantum entanglement, a strange quantum mechanical connection. In quantum entanglement, two or more physical objects are in a unified quantum state, and they can produce quantum correlation even if they are far apart. A decisive feature of quantum entanglement is that it must be established directly at one time. You can't achieve quantum entanglement by performing separate operations on two objects, even if you call your friends in another place and tell them how you operate at the same time.

In 2008, Horida proposed a protocol for teleportation of quantum energy. When studying black holes, Horida began to think that a strange phenomenon in quantum theory-negative energy-may be the key to measuring quantum entanglement. Black holes are explored by emitting radiation that produces quantum entanglement within them, a process that can also be thought of as swallowing up a large amount of negative energy. Horida points out that negative energy and quantum entanglement seem to be closely related. To test his point, he set out to prove that negative energy-such as quantum entanglement-cannot be generated by independent operations in different spaces.

To Horida's surprise, he found that a series of simple events could actually induce a quantum vacuum to turn into negative energy and release energy that the quantum vacuum does not seem to have. "at first I thought I was wrong," he said, "so I calculated again and checked my logic. But I couldn't find any mistakes."

The problem comes from the unique nature of the quantum vacuum, which is a strange vacuum, but it is always close to the existing matter. The principle of uncertainty prohibits any quantum system from entering a state where the energy is completely zero. Therefore, even in a vacuum, there must always be fluctuations in the quantum field. These never-ending fluctuations give each field a lowest energy, called zero point energy. Physicists say a system with this lowest energy is in the ground state. The system in the ground state is a bit like a car parked on the streets of a city on the plateau. Although it is far above sea level, its energy cannot be lower.

However, Mr Horida seems to have found an energy "underground garage". He realized that to open the door, he only needed to take advantage of the internal entanglement in the fluctuations of the quantum field.

Uninterrupted vacuum energy fluctuations cannot be used to power perpetual motion machines because energy fluctuations at a particular location are completely random. Imagine that if you connect a strange quantum battery to a vacuum, half of the fluctuations will charge the device, while the other half will consume power.

But the quantum field is entangled, and the fluctuations in one place often match those in another. In 2008, Horida published a paper outlining how two "physicists", Alice and Bob, used quantum entanglement to extract energy from the ground state around Bob. The plan goes like this:

Bob found that he needed energy. He wanted to charge that special quantum battery, but he was in a vacuum. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a well-equipped physics laboratory in a faraway place. Alice measures the field in her laboratory, energizes the field and understands its fluctuations. This experiment took the whole field out of the ground state, but Bob observed that his vacuum was still in the lowest energy state and the field still fluctuated randomly.

However, Alice sent Bob a message informing her of the change in the vacuum around her, mainly telling Bob when to plug in his battery. After Bob read her message, he could use it to prepare an experiment to extract energy from a vacuum, the energy Alice injected from another space.

Eduardo Martin Martinez, a theoretical physicist, said: "this information allows Bob to accurately describe fluctuations if you like." (he added that because of the abstract nature of the quantum field, the concept of "description" is more metaphorical than literal.)

Because the energy is conserved, Bob can't extract more energy than Alice provides. And before Alice's text arrived, he lacked the necessary information to extract energy, so there was no superluminal effect. The agreement does not violate any physical principles.

Nonetheless, Horida's article is controversial. Many people think that there are machines that use zero-point energy in vacuum in science fiction, and his theory angers some physicists who are tired of making crazy suggestions for such machines. But Horida was convinced that the design would be fruitful, and he continued to develop his theory and promote it in his speech. Horida was encouraged by Enru, who became famous for discovering another strange vacuum behavior.

"this kind of thing is almost second nature to me," Enru said. "you can do strange things with quantum mechanics."

Horida is also looking for a way to test his theory. He contacted Go Yusa, an experimental expert who specializes in condensed matter physics at Tohoku University in Japan. They propose to conduct experiments in a semiconductor system with entangled ground states similar to electromagnetic fields.

But their research has been repeatedly delayed. Shortly after their initial experiment was funded, the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroyed Japan's east coast, including Tohoku University. In recent years, two of the many earthquakes have damaged their sophisticated laboratory equipment. Now they start all over again.

Over time, Horida's idea took root in a less earthquake-prone place on earth. At the suggestion of Enru, Hiroda gave a speech in Banff, Canada in 2013. The speech captured Martinez's imagination. "Horida has a different way of thinking from other people," Martinez said. "he is a man with rich ideas and is very creative."

The experiment of teleportation of quantum energy has been tested on an IBM quantum computer. Martinez, the IBM quantum computer on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2020, half-jokingly calls himself a "space-time engineer." he has long been attracted by the cutting-edge physics of science fiction. He dreamed of finding reasonable physical ways to create wormholes, warp drives and time machines. Every strange phenomenon corresponds to the strange shape of space-time allowed by the equations of general relativity. But they are also prohibited by so-called energy conditions, and famous physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking put forward some physical restrictions on general relativity, making it impossible for the theory to show its barbaric side.

The main limitation in Hawking-Penrose's theory is the prohibition of negative energy density. But after listening to Horida's speech, Martinez realized that the energy density below the ground state was a bit like turning energy into negative energy. The concept was so attractive to a Star Trek fan that he devoted himself to Horida's work.

He soon realized that energy transfer could help researchers in the field of quantum information solve the problems they faced, such as Raymond Laflamme, a physicist at the University of Waterloo, and Nayeli Rodriguez Briones, his student at the time. The two of them have a more practical goal: to make qubits, the basic unit of quantum computers, as cold as possible. Cold qubits are reliable qubits, but the team encountered a theoretical limit beyond which it seemed impossible to extract more heat, just as Bob faced a vacuum where it seemed impossible to extract energy.

Raymond LaFlamm's team at the university of Waterloo verified the quantum energy teleportation protocol last year. When it was first introduced to LaFlamm's team, Martinez faced a lot of questions. But as Martinez reassured them, LaFlamm's team became more receptive to the theory. They began to study the teleportation of quantum energy and in 2017 proposed a way to transfer energy from qubits, making them colder than any other known method. Even so, "it's all theory," Martinez said. "there are no experiments."

Martinez and Briones worked with LaFram and an experimenter, Heymante Katiar (Hemant Katiyar), to change the situation.

They used nuclear magnetic resonance, which uses powerful magnetic fields and radio pulses to manipulate the quantum state of atoms in macromolecules. The team spent several years planning the experiment, and then Cartier designed an experiment in which energy was transferred between two carbon atoms, which played the roles of Alice and Bob, respectively.

Firstly, a series of fine-tuned radio pulses make the carbon atomic system in a special lowest energy ground state, which is characterized by the existence of quantum entanglement between two atoms. The zero energy of the system is determined by the initial states of the two carbon atoms, which we refer to as "Alice" and "Bob" mentioned above, and the quantum entanglement between them.

Next, they sent a radio pulse to Alice and the third atom, while measuring Alice's position and transmitting the information to a "text message" of an atom.

Finally, the information is transmitted to Bob at the same time by targeting "Bob" and another pulse of the intermediate atom, where it is measured, and the energy transmission is completed.

They repeated this process many times, making multiple measurements in each step, enabling them to reconstruct the quantum properties of the three atoms throughout the process. Finally, they calculated that the average energy of Bob's carbon atoms decreased, so that the energy was extracted and released into the environment. Although Bob's atom is always in the ground state at first, this happens. From start to finish, the agreement took no more than 37 milliseconds. However, it usually takes more than 20 times, nearly a whole second, for energy to pass from one side of the molecule to the other. The energy lost by Alice enabled Bob to get energy that could not be obtained in other ways.

"We are pleased to see the transfer of energy with current technology," Briones said.

In their paper, they described the first demonstration of teleportation of quantum energy, which was later published in top journals of physics.

Nayeri Rodriguez Briones believes that these systems can be used to study heat, energy and entanglement in quantum systems. The second experiment was conducted 10 months later.

A few days before Christmas in 2022, Kazuki Ikeda, a quantum computing researcher at Shixi University, was watching a video that mentioned wireless energy transmission. He wants to know if quantum mechanics can be used to do similar things. Then he remembered the work of Horida, a professor when he was an undergraduate at Tohoku University, and he realized that he could run a quantum energy teleportation protocol on a quantum computing platform.

Over the next few days, he wrote and executed such a program remotely. The experimental results show that Bob's qubit drops below its ground state energy. By January 7 this year, he published his results in a paper.

Nearly 15 years after Horida first proposed the concept of energy transfer, two simple experiments less than a year apart have proved that the theory is possible.

"these experiments are well done," Lloyd said. "I'm a little surprised that no one did it earlier."

The dream of science fiction

However, Mr Horida is not fully satisfied.

He praised the experiments as an important first step. But he believes that these experiments are quantum simulations, that is, entanglement is programmed into the ground state by radio pulses or operations in quantum computing platforms. His hope is to get zero energy from a system whose ground state is naturally entangled, just like the basic quantum field permeating the universe.

To that end, Horida Changkuan and you Sagang are pushing ahead with their experiment. In the next few years, they hope to demonstrate the remote transmission of quantum energy on a silicon surface with an essential entangled ground state and characterized by edge current, which behaves more like an electromagnetic field system.

At the same time, every physicist has his own point of view on the possible benefits of energy transfer. Briones believes that in addition to helping to stabilize quantum computers, it will continue to play an important role in studying the heat, energy and entanglement of quantum systems. In late January, Ikeda published another paper detailing how to establish remote energy transmission in the nascent quantum Internet.

Martinez continues to pursue his science fiction dream. He worked with general relativity simulator Eric Schnett (Erik Schnetter) to calculate precisely how space-time reacts to a particular negative energy arrangement.

Some researchers think his exploration is interesting. "this is a laudable goal," Lloyd said with a smile. "in a sense, not following up on this issue is irresponsible scientific behavior, and negative energy density is very important."

Others warn that the road from negative energy to strangely shaped spacetime is tortuous and uncertain. "our theory of quantum correlation is still developing," Enru said. "once calculations can be made, people will be constantly surprised by the actual situation."

For his part, Mr. Horida doesn't spend much time thinking about shaping time and space. Now to his delight, he has observed a real physical phenomenon in the calculation of quantum correlation that he began in 2008.

"this is real physics," Horida said. "it's not science fiction."

Author: Charlie Wood

Translation: sweeping monk

Revision: * 0

Original link: the quest to use quantum mechanics to pull energy out of nothing

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ID:cas-iop), author: Charlie Wood

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