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Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

nobelprize.org

81–90 of 110 posts

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#81
post #53

Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate! Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were t…

Interesting, this constant current source notion. For a design without feedback, and in an energetically inefficient way, maybe this can work too: 1. Determine what will be the maximum resistance of the "current consumer" part of your circuit throughout its operation. 2. Prepare a resistor several magnitudes larger than the resistance above. 3. Connect to the resistor above a (huge) voltage source so that the resulti…

This is pretty much what we do to apply small bias currents to our superconducting circuits. The signals are small (<1 uA), and the power is dissipated outside of the cryostat, so this method is very simple and effective. The voltage and resistors don’t even need to be that huge, ~10 MOhm or below, and correspondingly, <10 V.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a dumb question at all. The idea that a particle could pass through a wall by luckily avoiding collisions is a classical way of thinking. In that view, a particle is a tiny solid ball and a wall is just a collection of other tiny balls with space between them. Quantum tunneling is based on a completely different concept. In quantum mechanics, the "wall" is not a physical object but a high energy barrier. Classica…

Thanks, I'm still thinking about your answer but really appreciate your explanation. Would this mean that there is some (possibly currently unknown) maximum size for a group of particles that could be forced to maintain the correct state to pass through the wall?

There is no obvious limit to how big you could scale up this experiment right here. In practice, these circuits are already big enough that you can quite literally see them with the naked eye (~mm in length). Nothing really stops you from making one meters in diameter, aside from the obvious impracticality of cooling such a massive structure to the required temperature. Nobody expects this to break any known physics by doing so. In fact, some of these experiments have also been used to estimate lower bounds for nonlinear versions of quantum mechanics (where collapse is a real thing, and the larger an object is, the faster it collapses).

But you should not really think of a physical wall in this case. The experiments that have proven the macroscopic tunneling behave according to the same exact math, but nothing is really tunneling through macroscopic walls. The cooper pair electrons are, but that’s a different Nobel prize (Josephson, 1973).

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#84

This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here? (Still better than last year's award which wasn't really physics at all!)

> This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here?

There's a tradition of Nobel Prizes awarded for clever experiments, even if they do not uncover new fundamental laws.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#85
post #66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, thanks. But I was calling attention to a point in the previous comment that makes it difficult to see a kind of "dualism" between idealized current sources to idealized voltage sources. Idealized current or voltage sources don't necessarily have any series resistance, and it doesn't matter how they're realized.

Your point is well taken. My guess was that the OP had implementation in mind when they wrote "good voltage sources vary their resistance". Or that might have just been a mistake.

I'm certainly no electrical engineer, and I see how the nice duality was lost in my description. Yes, I was thinking about the ones I'd actually worked with, where the resistance was the control knob. I haven't done much electronics since, so my recollection isn't perfect. I have recently been doing some esp-32 control projects where I just used some power supply I bought. I should look into how it works!

Edit- I just looked up switching power supplies and remembered that I did actually know about those!

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#86
post #53

Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate! Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were t…

Oops, meant "understand feedback quite well*", can't edit for some reason?

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a dumb question at all. The idea that a particle could pass through a wall by luckily avoiding collisions is a classical way of thinking. In that view, a particle is a tiny solid ball and a wall is just a collection of other tiny balls with space between them. Quantum tunneling is based on a completely different concept. In quantum mechanics, the "wall" is not a physical object but a high energy barrier. Classica…

Thanks, I'm still thinking about your answer but really appreciate your explanation. Would this mean that there is some (possibly currently unknown) maximum size for a group of particles that could be forced to maintain the correct state to pass through the wall?

This is a very good question.

The real limit is not based on the size or number of particles, but on the coherence of the group of particles. Using the word coherence is probably not helpful without context, so let me give a quick explanation of what that means.

As I mentioned in my answer above, particles can exhibit wave-like properties. A group of particles will each have their own wave packet. In our everyday lives, two particles, even those right next to each other, are jiggling around randomly due to temperature and experiencing slightly different environments. You can think of each of these separate random jiggles as a measurement that collapses the wave function of that particle. Then, after the particle's wave function collapses, it begins to evolve again until the next measurement. As a side note, saying a measurement collapses the wave function is quantum mechanics talk for the observed reality that when we measure where a particle is, we do not find a wave, we find a particle. So, the shorthand for this view of quantum mechanics is that a measurement collapses the wave function.

Ok, so now we have a bunch of particles, like a chair. Why won't a chair tunnel through a wall? Well, all the particles that make up the chair are not just physically separated, but they are jiggling due to their temperature and their slightly different environments. So, all of these particles that make up the chair keep having their wave function collapsed randomly. The chance of one particle tunneling through the wall is small. The chance of all 10^27 particles in the chair independently tunneling through the barrier at once is not going to happen before the universe ends.

Back to coherence. All of these particles of the chair are independently jiggling around, and each one has its own wave function collapsed very quickly. For this reason, you can treat each particle as an independent particle. We would say the wave functions of these particles are not coherent with each other.

Now, imagine that we have two particles right next to each other. At room temperature, they are constantly jiggling and having their wave functions collapsed. If we cool them down to reduce the jiggling, and they are close enough to each other, their respective wave functions can start to overlap. When the jiggling of the particles is small enough and their wave functions overlap sufficiently, they begin to behave as a single quantum entity. This is a coherent state. In a suitably constructed experiment, these coherent particles can then exhibit quantum behaviors such as tunneling together.

Back to your question: is there some maximum size for a group of particles that could be forced to maintain the correct state to pass through the wall? Since the group of particles must be in a coherent quantum state to tunnel, the real question is how big of a group can be put into such a state. You have to cool them to slow the jiggling, isolate them from anything in the environment that might collapse their wave functions, and get them close enough together for their wave functions to overlap. There is likely a theoretical limit that could be calculated, but as a practical matter, extraordinary engineering efforts are required to get even a very small group of particles into a coherent quantum state. The direct answer to your question is that while there may be a theoretical maximum possible size of a coherent state for our universe, the real limit is set by the immense practical challenges of creating and maintaining a coherent state. This is what makes the work of this year’s Nobel Prize winners so impressive.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, attending a US university in a STEM subject is one of the only reliable ways to migrate to the country now that they've made it much harder to get H1b visas. The flow of immigrants seeking an American education will not stop any time soon.

That still involves H1B though? Student visas are non-immigrant, you still have to transition to an immigrant visa like H1B to actually stay past 1+2 years of STEM OPT

Was not aware of that

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

#90
post #53

Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate! Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were t…

Ideal current sources would also be pretty terrifying. Set it to even a "measly" 50mA and go poke someone with the output...

No need to poke somebody. Just turning it on would cause it to ramp up until air breakdown at the output electrodes, where you'd have a 50mA plasma!
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