Sounds interesting. It is similar in some ways to my idea some years ago of detecting gravitational waves by shifts in entanglement.
LC On Wednesday, July 1, 2020 at 5:06:28 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: > > A new type of very compact gravitational wave detector has been proposed > that's really cool, it would work in theory but would be very tricky to > make. But If we can figure out how to engineer it a detector just 1 meter > long would be as sensitive as the 4000 meter long LIGO detector; in fact it > would be so sensitive it could detect the Frame Dragging which Einstein > predicted the rotation of the earth would produce, and that's something > even LIGO can't do. The idea is to take an artificial diamond of one 1/1000 > of a millimeter across and put it into a quantum superposition, such an > object is very small by human standards but it's large enough to be seen > with a regular optical microscope, and that is enormous for the quantum > world. > > The diamond would be absolutely perfect except for one flaw, one carbon > atom in the lattice would be replaced by a single nitrogen atom. A > microwave photon would then hit the nitrogen atom which, according to the > weird laws of quantum mechanics, would both absorb and not absorb the > photon. The nitrogen atom that absorbs the photon would jump into a "spin > one state" and develop a magnetic field as a result, the atom that didn't > absorb the photon would remain in a "spin zero state" and have no > magnetism. Then by applying an external magnetic field it would be possible > to separate the two atoms and the carbon lattices they are attached to by a > distance as far as 1 meter. The external magnetic field would then be > reversed which would bring the two superpositions back together again. > > The last step is to send another microwave photon at the nitrogen atom, it > would be carefully tuned to change the shape of the superposition so that > the crests and troughs of the spin-one state perfectly overlap and cancel > out, while the crests of the spin-zero state overlap and reinforce each > other. Thus, in the absence of outside interference at the end of all this > a measurement of the electron would always find it in a spin-zero state. > That is to say if no gravitational waves occurred at the time of separation > the nitrogen atom will always be in the spin zero stay but if a > gravitational wave occurred during the separation things would no longer > perfectly overlap and a magnetic spin one state would be detected in the > resulting data with the frequency of the gravitational wave. > > Although most of these steps have already been performed in the lab, or > something close to it (recently a superposition of 10,000 atoms over a > distance of half a meter has been achieved, but this micro diamond would > contain about 10 billion atoms), nobody has ever done all these steps at > the same time so it won't be easy. As one scientist put it, it's one thing > to learn how to ride a bicycle and juggle, it's quite another to learn how > to ride a bicycle while you're juggling. But if we can figure out how to do > this it would be amazing, as Sougato Bosem the lead researcher on the > project said "The challenge is to get one of them working. If one of them > works, it would be very easy to make several more". > > https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.10830.pdf > > John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/dfc964d5-7130-444b-bf91-68c4d9fd90d7o%40googlegroups.com.
