Ciencia-Física

Charge Pomeranchuk orders. Skyrmion lattices. Magnetic monopoles in spin ice materials.

That may sound like a sci-fi shopping list, but according to Malte Grosche, head of the Quantum Matter Group at the New Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, U.K., these are developments in quantum physics that could lead to game-changing technologies ranging from electric airliners to artificial intelligence.

History has marked key technology breakthroughs, from the Stone Age to the steam age, and since the 1960s we have arguably been living in the quantum age.

In the early years of the 20th century, scientists discovered that the world of the very small—atoms, electrons, photons—behaves differently than the everyday objects composed of these quantum particles. When we throw a tennis ball, with a little help from Newton, we can work out where the ball will end up. But send a quantum particle on its way, and, after time, all that exists is a set of probabilities showing where the particle might be. It’s not just a lack of information. Strangely enough, until we actually make a measurement, the particle doesn’t have a location. This allows quantum particles to behave as if they are in more than one place at a time, or pass through apparently impenetrable barriers, a process known as “quantum tunneling.”

All that underscores the fact that quantum physics is often counterintuitive. The great American physicist Richard Feynman said that quantum theory “describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.”

But on the other hand, quantum physics works. And we know that because it’s the basis of so much of today’s technology.

At the most basic, almost everything we do is grounded in quantum physics—matter (all of it) is a collection of quantum particles, while light, electricity and magnetism are all quantum phenomena. At the next level are the quantum technologies we humans built without being aware of the physics that made them possible. When Swan and Edison produced electric lightbulbs, they didn’t know that light generated from a heated filament is a quantum process—they ended up implicitly drawing on quantum physics without even knowing it.