Caltech announces discovery in fundamental physics

http://phys.org/news/2015-08-caltech-discovery-fundamental-physics.html

by jonbaer • 11 years ago

70 30 11 years ago

phys.org

dghughes• 11 years ago

Got a non-spammy link?

skew• 11 years ago

http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-announces-discovery-fund...

cgs10192• 11 years ago

Looks like Nature makes the whole paper readable online: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys...

stephengillie• 11 years ago

Not to me it doesn't. I see this near the bottom of the page:

  READ THE FULL ARTICLE

  Subscribe to      Purchase article
  Nature Physics    full text and PDF:
  for full access:  $32
  $175              [Buy Now]
  [Subscribe]

Edit: Thanks Mr. M.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/626/1/012012/pdf/1742-65...

cgs10192• 11 years ago

Oops, maybe I unwittingly had access by being on work VPN. Sorry bout that! Thanks for the open link, jacquesm.

astroteller2• 11 years ago

Free supplementary materials PDF here: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/58610/3/nphys3416-s1.pdf

Edit: thanks for the downvotes!

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

I really don't think down voting is very helpful for the community unless people are being racist/sexist/obvious troll. Better people comment on why they disagree, clarifying ideas rather than a no response and arbitrary unlike.

fao_• 11 years ago

I assumed that was either in the guidelines or just general convention, to be honest.

duaneb• 11 years ago

Yea, I don't downvote comments unless they are straight-up counterproductive to conversation. The original comment is very useful.

roflchoppa• 11 years ago

its cool man, my all my accounts are throw away, so even if they get down votes it does not refrain me from speaking my opinion.

voting on comments is stupid, and should be removed.

dang• 11 years ago

Please read the HN guidelines, which say:

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

It often takes threads off-topic as well, as here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

astroteller2• 11 years ago

david-given2• 11 years ago

tl;dr abstract of the paper:

---snip---

Abstract. Instabilities of equilibrium quantum mechanics are common and well-understood. They are manifested for example in phase transitions, where a quantum system becomes so sensitive to perturbations that a symmetry can be spontaneously broken. Here, we consider the possibility that the time evolution governing quantum dynamics may be similarly subject to an instability, at which its unitarity spontaneously breaks down owing to an extreme sensitivity towards perturbations. We find that indeed such an instability exists, and we explore its immediate consequences. Interpretations of the results both in terms of extreme sensitivity to the influence of environmental degrees of freedom, and in terms of a possible fundamental violation of unitarity are discussed.

---snip---

Is this suggesting that quantum superpositions have a tendency to spontaneously collapse, or am I misreading it?

selimthegrim5• 11 years ago

Uh, this isn't the abstract of that nature paper at all

david-given2• 11 years ago

You're quite right. It's not. This is the correct abstract:

---snip---

Charge ordering in metals is a fundamental instability of the electron sea, occurring in a host of materials and often linked to other collective ground states such as superconductivity. What is difficult to parse, however, is whether the charge order originates among the itinerant electrons or whether it arises from the ionic lattice. Here we employ high-resolution X-ray diffraction, combined with high-pressure and low-temperature techniques and theoretical modelling, to trace the evolution of the ordering wavevector Q in charge and spin density wave systems at the approach to both thermal and quantum phase transitions. The non-monotonic behaviour of Q with pressure and the limiting sinusoidal form of the density wave point to the dominant role of the itinerant instability in the vicinity of the critical points, with little influence from the lattice. Fluctuations rather than disorder seem to disrupt coherence.

---snip---

So. What does this mean in English? Also, can I downvote my own posts?

pmalynin• 11 years ago

Obligatory http://sci-hub.org/10.1038/nphys3416

chockablock• 11 years ago

Here is the free full-text (provided by Nature as an in-browser read-only version): http://rdcu.be/dCSH

eranation• 11 years ago

Would anyone ELI5 please?

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

Hmmm, interesting. If I understand correctly this is a breakthrough in our understanding of the underlying physics related to superconductivity. Which could potentially lead not just to an improved understanding of superconductivity and toward new kinds of superconductors but also to new electronic phenomena in metals which might possibly be equally as interesting. This is a significant breakthrough in condensed matter physics, which may end up being one brick of a foundation of theoretical models which form the basis of a vastly superior understanding of matter compared to what we have today. Which might potentially enable uses that we cannot even envision today. Pretty exciting stuff.

selimthegrim5• 11 years ago

Well this is debatable. These anomalies figure into the so-called nodal gap in the antiferromagnetic, not the superconducting phase, of certain high temperature superconductors. There is hope that this might spread light on the nature of superconductivity.

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

Right. There's a lot of maybes and potentially with this research. It's something new and interesting but how much it will allow us to unlock some of the secrets of condensed matter physics that have so far eluded us remains to be proven.

Caltech announces discovery in fundamental physics

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