It seems that technology is moving too fast to actually understand the implications of each “breakthrough” that comes our way. For most people, the news of splitting an atom would not elicit an “Ooh!” or an “Ahh!”, besides engineering students, as it doesn’t greatly impact our everyday lives.
With that said, it was nice (for lack of a better term) to discover that researchers at the University of Bonn have been able to show how a single atom can be pulled apart into two halves and then put back together. While it may sound like the process of nuclear fission, this research is novel in the sense that Dr. Dieter Meschede and his team at the Institute of Applied Physics at said university, managed to keep an atom in two places at once at a distance of a 100th of a millimetre apart using the laws of quantum mechanics.
The laws of quantum mechanics state that objects can exist in several states simultaneously at any given time (search for the famous double-slit experiment that fundamentally demonstrates this phenomenon). In any case, such effects can’t occur unless the temperature approaches absolute zero and is carefully monitored. Using a laser, a cesium atom was cooled to a tenth of a million above absolute zero and of which it was held with another laser. Since atoms have a spin that can go in both directions, the atom can move to the right or to the left using said laser. The researchers at the University of Bonn were able to move the atom to the left and right (like a conveyor) simultaneously thereby having the atom occupy two states and therefore, splitting the atom, so to speak.
However, since quantum mechanics doesn’t allow you to make a direct measurement on the system, the split was not seen directly. For instances, if one was to try to take a picture of the atom, images of atoms would sometimes be on the left and sometimes on the right, but never on both sides. Nevertheless, the split was proven since the atom was put back together. Rather than trying to capture the split atom, the differences in magnetic field of the two positions and accelerations were measured since each state (being the left or the right) is characterized by the parameters just mentioned.
Using this technology, the researchers at the University of Bonn want to have the right and left halves of the atom to come in contact with other atoms adjacent to it so that it acts as a bridge between the two sides of the split atom. With this application, a small network of atoms can be connected in this way so that it can control systems to emulate phenomena (like plant photosynthesis) that were previously difficult to simulate. Also, such small quantum systems can be used to gain understanding as to how electrons move in solid bodies which can then provide starting points to further improve on electronic performance on devices currently available on the market.
While this work is fundamental in nature, it is easy to see that there are many possible applications for this breakthrough, whether it be through gaining insight on quantum phenomena, simulating small real-world systems, or making improvements on small devices (like chips) today. The next step for this research would be to first see the effects of placing atoms adjacent to the split atom and then to split more than one atom in the hopes of creating such a network as discussed so that it becomes a tool to monitor quantum-sized changes in real-world systems.
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