Items tagged with "many-body localization"
Quantum Gases Won’t Take the Heat
The quantum world blatantly defies intuitions that we’ve developed while living among relatively large things, like cars, pennies and dust motes. In the quantum world, tiny particles can maintain a special connection over any distance, pass through barriers and simultaneously travel down multiple paths.
A less widely known quantum behavior is dynamical localization, a phenomenon in which a quantum object stays at the same temperature despite a steady supply of energy—bucking the assumption that a cold object will always steal heat from a warmer object.
Ions sync up into world's first time crystal
Consider, for a moment, the humble puddle of water. If you dive down to nearly the scale of molecules, it will be hard to tell one spot in the puddle from any other. You can shift your gaze to the left or right, or tilt your head, and the microscopic bustle will be identical—a situation that physicists call highly symmetric.
Disorder grants a memory to quantum spins
Nature doesn’t have the best memory. If you fill a box with air and divide it in half with a barrier, it’s easy to tell molecules on the left from molecules on the right. But after removing the barrier and waiting a short while, the molecules get mixed together, and it becomes impossible to tell where a given molecule started. The air-in-a-box system loses any memory of its initial conditions.