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Quantum entanglement generation in trapped ions using coherent and dissipative methods public deposited.

• Entangled states are a key resource in fundamental quantum physics, quantum cryptography, and quantum computation. In this thesis, we focus on the demonstrations of two novel methods to generate entanglement. First, we implement dissipative production of a maximally entangled steady state on two trapped ions. Dissipative and coherent processes are combined and implemented in a continuous time-independent fashion, analogous to optical pumping of atomic states, continuously driving the system towards the steady entangled state. With this method, we obtain a Bell state fidelity up to 0.89(2). Second, we propose and demonstrate a novel coherent process to confine quantum evolution in a subspace between an initial separable state and the target entangled state. We demonstrate this scheme on two and three ions obtaining a Bell state fidelity up to 0.992(2). Both of these methods are robust against certain types of experimental noise and decoherence. Additionally, we demonstrate sympathetic cooling of ion chains to near the ground state of motion with an electromagnetically-induced-transparency (EIT) method. This results in roughly an order of magnitude faster cooling time while using significantly lower laser power compared to the conventional resolved sideband cooling method. These techniques may be helpful for scaled-up quantum computing.
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• 19 December 2023

Does quantum theory imply the entire Universe is preordained?

• Eddy Keming Chen 0

Eddy Keming Chen is a philosopher of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

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Is cosmic evolution a single track with no choice about the destination? Credit: Getty

Was there ever any choice in the Universe being as it is? Albert Einstein could have been wondering about this when he remarked to mathematician Ernst Strauss: “What I’m really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.”

US physicist James Hartle, who died earlier this year aged 83, made seminal contributions to this continuing debate. Early in the twentieth century, the advent of quantum theory seemed to have blown out of the water ideas from classical physics that the evolution of the Universe is ‘deterministic’. Hartle contributed to a remarkable proposal that, if correct, completely reverses a conventional story about determinism’s rise with classical physics, and its subsequent fall with quantum theory. A quantum Universe might, in fact, be more deterministic than a classical one — and for all its apparent uncertainties, quantum theory might better explain why the Universe is the one it is, and not some other version.

The ‘brazen’ science that paved the way for the Higgs boson (and a lot more)

In physics, determinism means that the state of the Universe at any given time and the basic laws of physics fully determine the Universe’s backward history and forward evolution. This idea reached its peak with the strict, precise laws about how the Universe behaves introduced by classical physics. Take Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. If someone knew the present positions and momenta of all particles, they could in theory use Newton’s laws to deduce all facts about the Universe, past and future. It’s only a lack of knowledge (or computational power) that prevents scientists from doing so.

Along with this distinctive predictive power, determinism underwrites scientific explanations that come close to the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ most famously articulated by German polymath Gottfried Leibniz: that everything has an explanation. Every state of the Universe (with one obvious exception, which we’ll come to) can be completely explained by an earlier one. If the Universe is a train, determinism says that it’s running on a track, with no option to switch to any other path because different tracks never cross.

Physicists have conventionally liked determinism’s predictive and explanatory power. Others, including some philosophers, have generally been more divided, not least because of how determinism might seem to preclude human free will: if the laws of physics are deterministic, and our actions are just the summation of particle interactions, there seems to be no room for us to freely choose A instead of B, because the earlier states of the Universe will already have determined the outcome of our choice. And if we are not free, how can we be praised or blamed for our actions? Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky’s 2023 book Determined touches on this fascinating and controversial issue.

Space invaders

The strange behaviours of quantum particles that began to emerge in the twentieth century fundamentally shifted the debate surrounding determinism in physics. The laws of quantum mechanics give only the probabilities of outcomes, which can be illustrated with the thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 (although when he devised it, he was concerned mainly with how the wavefunction represents reality). A cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison that might or might not have been broken by a random event — because of radioactive decay, for example. If quantum mechanics applied to the cat, it would be described by a ‘wavefunction’ in a superposition of ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. The wavefunction, when measured, randomly jumps to one of the two states, and quantum mechanics specifies only the probability of either possibility occurring. One consequence of the arrival of quantum mechanics was that it seemed to throw determinism out of the window.

How Stephen Hawking flip-flopped on whether the Universe has a beginning

But this accepted idea might not be the whole story, as developments in the second half of the twentieth century suggested. The quantum Universe could actually be more deterministic than a classical one, for two reasons. The first is technical. Newton’s laws allow situations in which the past does not determine how things will move in the future. For example, the laws do not provide an upper bound on how much an object can be accelerated, so in theory a classical object can reach spatial infinity in finite time. Reverse this process, and you get what have been called ‘space invaders’ — objects that come from spatial infinity with no causal connection to anything else in the Universe, and which can’t be predicted from any of the Universe’s past states.

In practice, this problem is solved by the universal speed limit, the speed of light, introduced by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. But unruly infinities also plague Einsteinian relativity, which is a classical theory. The equations of general relativity lead to ‘singularities’ of infinite curvature, most notoriously in black holes and at the Big Bang at the beginning of the Universe. Singularities are like gaps in space-time where the theory no longer applies; in some cases, anything can come out of them (or disappear into them), threatening determinism.

Many physicists think that quantum theory can come to the rescue by removing such singularities — for example, by converting the Big Bang into a ‘Big Bounce’, with a Universe that continues to evolve smoothly on the other side of the singularity. If they are right, a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ that fully unifies quantum theory, which predicts the behaviour of matter on the smallest scales, and Einstein’s relativity, which encapsulates the large-scale evolution of the Universe, will smooth out the gaps in space-time and restore determinism.

Space-time ‘singularities’ inside black holes could threaten a deterministic cosmic order. Credit: ESO/SPL

But there is a deeper reason why the quantum Universe might be more deterministic, to which Hartle’s scientific legacies are relevant. With US physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Hartle developed an influential approach to quantum theory, called decoherent histories 1 . This attempted to explain the usefulness of probabilistic statements in quantum physics, and the emergence of a familiar, classical realm of everyday experience from quantum superpositions. In their picture, the wavefunction never randomly jumps. Instead, it always obeys a deterministic law given by Schrödinger’s equation, which characterizes the smooth and continuous evolution of quantum states. In this respect, it is similar to US physicist Hugh Everett III’s popular ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposes that the quantum Universe splits into different branches according to the possibilities encoded in the wavefunction whenever anything is measured 2 . In what follows I assume, as Everett did, that the Universe can be completely described by a quantum wavefunction with no ‘hidden’ variables that operate on a more fundamental level.

Into the quantum cosmos

With Stephen Hawking, Hartle went on to become one of the founders of quantum cosmology, which applies quantum theory to the entire Universe. In a classical Universe, there is freedom in choosing how it all started. Even setting aside the extreme situations mentioned earlier, classical mechanics is deterministic merely in that it lays down many possible evolutionary histories for the Universe, and offers conditional statements about them: if this happens, then that must happen next. To return to the train analogy, a deterministic theory does not, by itself, say why the train is on any one given track out of many: why it is going from A to B via C, rather than from X to Y via Z. We can go back to earlier states to explain the current state, and do that all the way back to the initial state — but this initial state is not explained by anything that precedes it. Ultimately, standard determinism fails to fully satisfy Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason: when it comes to the initial state, something remains without an explanation.

See me here, see me there

This failure is not just philosophical. A complete theory of the Universe should predict the phenomena we observe in it, including its large-scale structure and the existence of galaxies and stars. The dynamic equations we have, whether from Newtonian physics or Einsteinian relativity, cannot do this by themselves. Which phenomena show up in our observations depend sensitively on the initial conditions. We must look at what we see in the Universe around us, and use this information to determine the initial condition that might have given rise to such observations.

A theory that specifies deterministic laws of both the Universe’s temporal evolution and its exact initial condition satisfies what English physicist Roger Penrose called ‘strong determinism’ in his 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind . This is, according to Penrose, “not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time”. Let us say that a Universe is strongly deterministic if its basic laws of physics fix a unique cosmic history. If determinism provides a set of non-crossing train tracks, without specifying which one is being used, then strong determinism lays down a single track that has no choice even about where it starts.

A universal wavefunction

Strong determinism is hard to implement in classical physics. You might consider doing it by specifying the initial condition of the Universe as a law. But although the dynamical laws of classical physics are simple, the Universe itself is complex — and so its initial condition must have been, too. Describing the precise positions and momenta of all the particles involved requires so much information that any statement of the initial condition is too complex to be a law.

Hartle suggested 3 that quantum mechanics can solve this complexity problem. Because a quantum object’s wavefunction is spread out across many ‘classical’ states (cat alive or cat dead, for instance), you could propose a simple initial condition that includes all the complexities as emergent structures in the quantum superposition of these states. All the observed complexities can be regarded as partial descriptions of a simple fundamental reality: the Universe’s wavefunction. As an analogy, a perfect sphere can be cut into many chunks with complicated shapes, yet they can be put back together to form a simple sphere.

In 1983, Hartle and Hawking introduced 4 one of the first (and highly influential) proposals about the quantum Universe’s initial state. Their ‘no boundary’ wavefunction idea suggests that the ‘shape’ of the Universe is like that of a shuttlecock: towards the past, it rounds off smoothly and shrinks to a single point. As Hawking said in a 1981 talk on the origin of the Universe in the Vatican: “There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the Universe, and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary?”

Unique, or not unique?

In this perspective, the quantum Universe has two basic laws: a deterministic one of temporal evolution and a simple one that picks an initial wavefunction for the Universe. Hence, the quantum Universe satisfies strong determinism. The physical laws permit exactly one cosmic history of the Universe, albeit one described by a wavefunction that superposes many classical trajectories. There is no contingency in what the Universe as a whole could have been, and no alternative possibility for how it could have started. Every event, including the first one, is explained; the entire wavefunction of the Universe for all times is pinned down by the laws. The probabilities of quantum mechanics do not exist at the level of the basic physical laws, but can nonetheless be assigned to coarse-grained and partial descriptions of bits of the Universe.

This leads to a more predictive and explanatory theory. For example, the no-boundary proposal makes predictions for a relatively simple early Universe and for the occurrence of inflation — a period of rapid expansion that the Universe seems to have undergone in its first instants.

There are still many wrinkles to this proposal, not least because some studies have shown that, contrary to initial expectations, the theory might not single out a unique wavefunction for the Universe 5 , 6 . But studies in quantum foundations — research that is mostly independent from that of quantum cosmology — could offer yet another method for implementing strong determinism. Several researchers have considered the controversial idea that quantum states of closed systems, including the Universe, need not be restricted to wavefunctions, but instead can come from a broader category: the space of density matrices 7 – 10 .

The ultimate theory

Density matrices can be thought of as ‘superpositions of superpositions’, and they provide extra options for the initial condition of the Universe. For example, if we have reasons to adopt the ‘past hypothesis’ — the idea, which seems likely, that the Universe began in a low-entropy state (and its entropy has been increasing steadily since) — and that this theory corresponds to a set of wavefunctions, then we can choose a simple density matrix that corresponds to the uniform mixture of that set. As I have argued 10 , if we regard the density matrix as the initial state of the Universe and accept that it is specified by a law, then this choice, together with the deterministic von Neumann equation (a generalization of Schrödinger’s equation), can satisfy strong determinism. However, in this case, the laws fix a cosmic history of a quantum Universe that has many evolving branches — a ‘multiverse’.

So how deterministic is the Universe? The answer will depend on the final theory that bridges the divide between quantum physics and relativity — and that remains a far-off prospect. But if Hartle is right, the story of the rise and fall of determinism until now might be the reverse of the conventional tale. From a certain perspective, the quantum Universe is more deterministic than a classical one, providing stronger explanations and better predictions. That has consequences for humans, too, because that makes it harder to appeal to quantum theory to defend free will 11 . If the quantum Universe is strongly deterministic, then there is no other path to make the Universe than the way it is. The ultimate laws of the quantum cosmos might tell us why it is this one.

Nature 624 , 513-515 (2023)

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Trapped Ion Quantum Information

CHRISTOPHER MONROE, Principal Investigator. University of Maryland Department of Physics, Joint Quantum Institute, and Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science

University of Maryland

Engineering a Control System for a Logical Qubit-Scale Trapped Ion Quantum Computer, Andrew Risinger, Ph.D Electrical and Computer Engineering (2022)

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Simulating many-body quantum spin models with trapped ions , Antonis Kyprianidis, Ph.D. Physics (2021)

Experimental Study of Quantum Algorithms on Ion-trap Quantum Computers , Daiwei Zhu, Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering (2021)

Design and Construction of a Three-Node Quantum Network , Allison Carter, Ph.D Physics (2021)

Scaling Quantum Computers with Long Chains of Trapped Ions , Laird Egan, Ph.D. Physics (2021)

Cryogenic Trapped-Ion System for Large-Scale Quantum Simulation , Wen Lin Tan, Ph.D.Physics (2021)

Mixed-Species Ion Chains for Quantum Networks , Ksenia Sosnova, Ph.D. Physics (2020)

Construction, Optimization, and Applications of a Small Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer , Kevin Landsman, Ph.D. Electrical Engineering (2019)

High Purity Single Photons Entangled with Barium Ions for Quantum Networking , Clayton Crocker, Ph.D. Physics (2019)

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Multi-Species Trapped Atomic Ion Modules for Quantum Networks , I. Volkan Inlek, Ph.D. Physics (2016)

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Quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity are the two solid pillars that underlie much of modern physics. Understanding how these two well-established theories are related remains a central open question in theoretical physics.  Over the last several decades, efforts in this direction have led to a broad range of new physical ideas and mathematical tools.  In recent years, string theory and quantum field theory have converged in the context of holography, which connects quantum gravity in certain space-times with corresponding (conformal) field theories on a lower-dimensional space-time. These developments and connections have deepened our understanding not only of quantum gravity, cosmology, and particle physics, but also of intermediate scale physics, such as condensed matter systems, the quark-gluon plasma, and disordered systems.  String theory has also led to new insights to problems in many areas of mathematics.

The interface of quantum physics and gravity is currently leading to exciting new areas of progress, and is expected to remain vibrant in the coming decade.  Researchers in the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) have been at the forefront of many of the developments in these directions.  CTP faculty members work on string theory foundations, the range of solutions of the theory, general relativity and quantum cosmology, problems relating quantum physics to black holes, and the application of holographic methods to strongly coupled field theories.  The group in the CTP has close connections to condensed matter physicists, astrophysicists, and mathematicians both at MIT and elsewhere.

In recent years a set of new developments has begun to draw unexpected connections between a number of problems relating aspects of gravity, black holes, quantum information, and condensed matter systems. It is becoming clear that quantum entanglement, quantum error correction, and computational complexity play a fundamental role in the emergence of spacetime geometry through holographic duality.  Moreover these tools have led to substantial progress on the famous black hole information problem, giving new avenues for searching for a resolution of the tension between the physics of black holes and quantum mechanics.  CTP faculty members Netta Engelhardt and Daniel Harlow have been at the vanguard of these developments, which also tie into the research activity of several other CTP faculty members, including Aram Harrow , whose primary research focus is on quantum information, and Hong Liu , whose research connects black holes and quantum many-body dynamics.

Holographic dualities give both a new perspective into quantum gravitational phenomena as encoded in quantum field theory, and a way to explore aspects of strongly coupled field theories using the gravitational dual. CTP faculty have played a pioneering role in several applications of holographic duality. Hong Liu and Krishna Rajagopal are at the forefront of efforts that use holography to find new insights into the physics of the quark-gluon plasma. Liu was among the first to point out possible connections between black hole physics and the strange metal phase of high temperature superconductors, and in recent years has been combining insights from effective field theories, holography, and condensed matter physics to address various issues concerning far-from-equilibrium systems including superfluid turbulence, entanglement growth, quantum chaos, thermalization, and a complete formulation of fluctuating hydrodynamics. Gravitational effective field theories play a key role in the interpretation of gravitational wave observations. Mikhail Ivanov works at the intersection of these fields with the aim of testing strong field gravity at a new precision frontier.

Even though we understand string theory better than we did in decades past, there is still no clear fundamental description of the theory that works in all situations, and the set of four-dimensional solutions, or string vacua, is still poorly understood.  The work of Washington Taylor and Barton Zwiebach combines physical understanding with modern mathematical methods to address these questions, and has led to new insights into how observed physics fits into the framework of string theory as well as the development of new mathematical results and ideas. Alan Guth ‘s foundational work on inflationary cosmology has led him to focus on basic questions about the physics of the multiverse that arises naturally in the context of the many string theory vacua, and which provides the only current natural explanation for the observed small but positive cosmological constant.

Symmetry has long been a guiding principle in the study of quantum field theory and gravity. Shu-Heng Shao ’s research focuses on generalizations of global symmetries in field theory and lattice systems. These new symmetries and their anomalies lead to various new dynamical constraints on (de)confinement, scattering amplitudes, renormalization group flows, and more. They also unify different conjectures in quantum gravity and holography. The microscopic lattice realizations of these new symmetries are naturally expressed through tensor networks, indicating an intriguing link to quantum information theory. 

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Title: some aspects of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory on quantum space- time.

Abstract: This thesis is devoted to studying various aspects of quantum mechanics on non-commutative space-time and to capture some of the surviving aspects of symmetries of quantum field theory on such space-time, illustrated through toy models in (0 + 1) dimension. This allows one to gain some insights into this and other related issues in a more transparent manner.

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The Influence of Quantum Physics on Philosophy

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• Volume 28 , pages 477–488, ( 2023 )

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We ponder the question whether quantum physics has had any influence on philosophy, and if not, whether it ought to have had any. Answers to these questions are provided, and they turn out to depend on which branch of the tree of philosophy we sweep, sway and swing, and even which twig of the branch we touch when we sweep, sway and swing.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Quantum mechanics matured in the 1920s, barging into adulthood with the books of Weyl ( 1931 ), Dirac ( 1931 ) and Neumann ( 1932 ); see Jammer ( 1966 , 1989 ). That quantum mechanics was more than just another physical theory, became clear comparatively quickly. Bohr’s ruminations about ‘the epistemological lessons that quantum theory has taught us’ have become legendary. Most of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics were sensitive to philosophical consequences of quantum mechanics. They thought about it, talked about it, and wrote about it in letters and papers (see Jammer 1974 ). A little earlier, Einstein’s theories of relativity had also proved to have philosophical consequences. The Relativity Revolution and the Quantum Revolution changed physics fundamentally: modern physics was born. Classical physics had to step aside.

Did these philosophical consequences actually reach philosophy? Has the Quantum Revolution had any influence on philosophy? If it had not had any influence, should it have had any influence? These questions are the topic of this paper.

A terminological remark. The term quantum physics designates that part of physics where quantum theories and models are used. This includes quantum mechanics, quantum field theories, the standard model of elementary particles and their interactions, quantum solid state physics, quantum cosmology, quantum optics, quantum chemistry, quantum information theory, quantum gravity, and the new kid on the block: quantum biology.

Since I started in Academia as philosopher of physics about 30 years ago, philosophy of physics is the first thing that comes to my mind when considering the influence of quantum physics on philosophy.

2 Influence of Philosophy of Physics

Philosophy of physics is a young branch of the tree of philosophy. The grandfathers were philosophers of science who fully engaged with modern physics:

Hans Reichenbach, Adolf Grünbaum (Germany), Hilary Putnam, Howard Stein, Abner Shimony (USA), Mario Bunge (Argentina), Paul Feyerabend (Austria), \(\ldots\)

We are talking about the 1950s–1970s. Availing myself to loose generation talk, the next generation of philosophers of physics were philosophers, some of them physicists who became philosophers (1970s onwards):

Clifford Hooker (Australia), Diederik Aerts (Belgium), Roberto Torretti (Chile), Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Peter Mittelstaedt (Germany), Bernard d’Espagnat, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond (France), Franco Selleri, Gino Tarozzi, Enrico Beltrametti, Maria Dalla Chiara, Gian Carlo Ghirardi (Italy), Max Jammer (Israel), Jan Hilgevoord, Dennis Dieks (The Netherlands), Michael Redhead (UK), John Earman, Arthur Fine, John Norton, Lawrence Sklar, David Malament, Jeffrey Bub, James Cushing, Bas van Fraassen, Paul Teller, Gordon Fleming (USA), \(\ldots\)

Most of them retired, some of them have passed away. The third generation (1980s onwards) includes:

Michel Ghins (Belgium), Steve Savitt (Canada), Michel Bitbol (France), Brigitte Falkenburg, Paul Busch (Germany), Miklós Redei, Lásló Szabó (Hungary), Jos Uffink (The Netherlands), Julian Barbour, Simon Saunders, Steven French Jeremy Butterfield, Harvey Brown (UK), Jon Dorling (UK-The Netherlands) Richard Healey (UK-USA), Rob Clifton (Canada-USA), David Albert, Don Howard, Tim Maudlin, Robert Rynasiewicz, Robert Weingard (USA) \(\ldots\)

Most of them have supervisors from the previous generation and have now retired or are approaching retirement. Today philosophers of physics have populated the Earth (some of them have left the branch, between fresh post-docs and approaching retirement, 1990s onwards):

Pablo Acuña, Emily Adlam, Alexander Afriat, Valia Allori, Frank Arntzenius, Aristidis Arageorgis, David Atkinson, Guido Bacciagaluppi, Jonathan Bain, David Baker, Yuri Balashov, Jeffrey Barrett, Thomas Barrett, Robert Batterman, Gordon Belot, Jossi Berkovitz, Thomas Bigaj, Soazig Le Bihan, Robert Bishop, Alisa Bokulich, Katherine Brading, Tim Budden, Craig Callender, Claudio Calosi, Elena Castellani, Adam Caulton, Karen Crowther, Michael Cuffaro, Erik Curiel, Radin Dardashti, Richard Dawid, Talal Debs, Neil Dewar, Michael Dickson, Julius Doboszewski, Mauro Dorato, Armond Duwell, Mathias Egg, Michael Esfeld, Vincenzo Fano, Sam Fletcher, Doreen Fraser, Simon Friedrich, Roman Frigg, Matthias Frisch, Chris Fuchs, Roberto Giuntini, Alexei Grinbaum, Alexandre Guay, Hans Halvorson, Amit Hagar, Sebastian de Haro, Stefan Hartmann, Meir Hemmo, Leah Henderson, Ronnie Hermens, Guy Hetzroni, Carl Hoefer, Mark Hogarth, Nick Huggett, Alexander Hütteman, Jenann Ismael, Vassilios Karakostas, Ruth Kastner, Eleanor Knox, Fred Kronz, James Ladyman, Vincent Lam, Marc Lange, Federico Laudisa, Dennis Lehmkuhl, Matt Leifer, Peter Lewis, Olimpia Lombardi, Janneke van Lith, Holger Lyre, John Manchak, Michela Massimi, James Mattingly, Owen Maroney, Casey McCoy, Gordon McCabe, Kerry McKenzie, Matteo Morganti, Margaret Morrison, Wayne Myrvold, Thomas Müller, Jill North, Antigone Nounou, Thomas Pashby, Kent Peacock, Slobodan Perovic, Itamar Pitowsky, Brian Pitts, Tomasz Placek, Oliver Pooley, Huw Price, James Read, Henk de Regt, Katinka Ridderbos, Dean Rickles, Bryan Roberts, Katie Robertson, Joshua Rosaler, Thomas Ryckman, Laura Ruetsche, Juha Saatsi, Chris Smeenk, Michael Stölzner, Ward Struyve, Mauricio Suárez, Michiel Seevinck, Orly Shenker, Sheldon Smith, Adán Sus, Nicolas Teh, Karim Thébault, Chris Timpson, Giovanni Valente, Antony Valentini, Pieter Vermaas, Peter Vickers, David Wallace, Jim Weatherall, Steven Weinstein, Charlotte Werndl, Chris Wüthrich, Nino Zanghí, Henrik Zinkernagel, Lena Zuchowski, \(\ldots\)

I have not strifed for completeness in listing these philosophers of physics: I am just bowing my head sideways and all these names pour out, surprisingly in alphabetical order (I have seen or talked to nearly every single one of them; I have not included PhDs; I should have included myself but I didn’t; and embarrassing omisions will exist). The global community of philosophers of physics I estimate between 100 and 250 people—this is in the order of magnitude of one millionth \(\%\) of the world’s population: how many philosophers of physics does the world need?

Then there are physicists and mathematical physicists who publish, occasionally or frequently, in the field of philosophy of physics, such as Sean Carroll, Lucien Hardy, Adrian Kent, Klaas Landsman, Tony Leggett, Roger Penrose, Carlo Rovelli, Henry Stapp, Tony Sudberry, Yogi Aharonov and Lev Vaidman.

The grandfathers published their papers mostly in philosophy of science journals, e.g. Philosophy of Science , The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science , in general philosophy journals, such as Synthese , Journal of Philosophy , and Erkenntnis , and in conference volumes, e.g. the marvellous Minnesota series in philosophy of science. Foundations of Physics and the short-lived Physics Essays published philosophy of physics papers. In 1995, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics was born, as an off-spring of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science . Conferences, workshops and PhD theses devoted to philosophy of physics became routine. During the past decades, summer schools devoted to philosophy of physics have been organised. Philosophy of physics seems here to stay.

As happens with a burgeoning branch in academia, branching has set in. We can discern roughly four sub-branches of philosophy of physics:

Quantum Physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory).

Spacetime and Cosmology (classical mechanics, two theories of relativity).

Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics.

Quantum Gravity and String Theory.

The grandfathers as well as the next generation were mainly interested in the first two sub-branches. The last two arose later, in the order mentioned above. The attention to speculative physics, e.g. quantum gravity and string theory, is the most recently grown sub-branch. Yet still today, as a glance at the Pittsburgh Archive for the Philosophy of Science suggests, quantum physics attracts by far the most philosophical attention. On 18 July 2020, the Pittsburgh Archive held 2882 philosophy of physics items, categorised as follows:

Quantum Theories: 1673 = 1301 (Quantum Mechanics) + 372 (Quantum Field Theory).

 Relativity Theory: 756.

 Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics: 303.

 Fields and Particles: 289.

 Classical Physics: 359.

 Symmetry and Invariance: 358.

 Cosmology: 257.

 Quantum Gravity: 159.

 Condensed Matter: 50.

 Astrophysics: 11.

Admittedly, various papers are counted more than once: 4215 is the sum of the numbers above, not 2882. But many if not most papers classified under ‘Particles and Fields’, ‘Symmetry and Invariance’ and ‘Condensed Matter Physics’ concern quantum theories. So when correcting for these two considerations, we arguably shall still reach the conclusion that quantum theories form the biggest sub-branch of philosophy of physics (at least 60%). To assert that quantum physics has influenced philosophy of physics is a platitude, quantum physics has been and still is constitutive of philosophy of physics.

To conclude: being constitutive of a growing and blossoming new branch at the tree of philosophy, how much more influential on the tree of philosophy can you get?

3 Influence on Philosophy

The most obvious way to take the question whether quantum physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory) has had any influence on philosophy generally is whether it has had any influence on discussions about prominent questions addressed in philosophy of the Twentieth century. We can safely shove Continental Philosophy aside: the influence of quantum physics on the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Sloterdijk, Deleuze, Zizek, Badiou, Lacan, Lyotard, Laruelle, Kristeva, etc. is epsilonically small if not zero—exceptions I am aware of is some of the work of Bitbol ( 2020 ), who trades between Analytic and Continental Philosophy, and the same holds for Cassirer ( 1937 ). Concerning Analytic Philosophy, we can take heed of the results of the Philosophical Papers Survey, conducted by David Chalmers and David Bourget ( 2014 ; an update and extension is in the making). They asked opinons about 30 controversial issues in philosophy and obtained 3226 responses:

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic–synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

God: theism or atheism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Time: A- or B-theory?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch?

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Quantum physics had no discernible influence on any of these debates, full stop. Should it have influenced these debates? For most issues, I don’t see what it could have contributed or how it should contribute. There are possible exceptions. In the next Sections, we shall next take a look at specific branches at the tree of philosophy, where some of the issues of the Chalmers-Bourget list will return.

4 Influence on Philosophy of Mind

The widely adumbrated and conceptually almost vacuous supervenience thesis (see below) suggests that quantum physics should connect with philosophy of mind. After all, quantum mechanics and quantum field theories are our best scientific theories of matter, and the supervience thesis is about the relation between matter and mind: it claims that the correlations between brain states and mental states imply that different mental states are correlated to different brain states. None other than David Chalmers had a Chapter on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in his landmark treatise The Conscious Mind ( 1996 ). Yet a glance at any companion and anthology in the philosophy of mind testifies to the absence of any influence of quantum physics.

Should it have any influence? The brain is a macroscopic physical system, according to physics. The only part of quantum physics relevant for it might be condensed matter quantum mechanics. But the brain is no neatly arrayed lattice of atoms of a single type (which is the starting point in nearly every quantum-mechanical model of matter in the solid state), but an extremely complicated and composite physical system with many types of atoms and molecules, forming neurons having dendrites and axons, chemically and electrically interacting all the time, overall in a solid state but having trillions of parts in a liquid state, which makes the brain far too complex for any feasible quantum-mechanical model. Roger Penrose ( 1989 , p. 400) is one of the very few who has not closed down the road to quantum physics when it comes to understanding of the brain: “One might speculate, however, that somewhere deep in the brain, cells are to be found of single quantum sensitivity. If this proves to be the case, then quantum mechanics will be significantly involved in brain activity.” Might speculate. Yet the idea has now been touched by the magic Nobel wand, and in Star Trek Picard , I saw someone having a PhD in quantumconsciousness: who knows what the future has in store for us?

So quantum mechanics has had nothing to say about the brain, despite first appearances and some speculations otherwise notwithstanding. This is why quantum mechanics justifiably is absent from philosophy of mind. Please don’t be alarmed that a Google-search the www for ‘quantum consciousness’ yields almost 21 million hits—a search for ‘little green men’ yields 300 million hits (on 23 October 2020).

The idea of Von Neumann and Wigner to invoke consciousness to solve the reality problem of quantum mechanics, a.k.a. the measurement problem, which according to Wigner put an end to ‘materialism’ (reduction of mind to matter, in a nutshell), has had no influence on developments of, and debates in, the philosophy of mind. The Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp ( 2009 ) belongs to the very few still pursuing this line. It shouldn’t have had either; for sympathetic reviews of these issues, see Butterfield ( 1998 ) and the Lemma ‘Quantum Approaches Consciousness’ of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

5 Influence on Logic

Since 1936, when Birkhoff & Von Neumann ( 1936 ) published their seminal paper on quantum logic, suggesting that quantum mechanics fitted a logic different from standard classical logic better, quantum propositional logic has often been referred to as opening up the possibility of the synthetic and a posteriori character of logic, rather than analytic and a priori (Putnam 1971 ). During the 1960s and 1970s, Hilary Putnam used quantum propositional logic explicitly to defend the empirical character of logic, i.e. as being synthetic and a posteriori; and Putnam intrepidly trotted further by claiming that adopting quantum logic would dissolve various, if not all, interpretation problems of quantum mechanics, in such a way that realism about quantum mechanics could be upheld after all, contra Copenhagen. This has not ended well for Putnam, who had to face a collection of stamping critics, among which McGrath ( 1971 ), Stairs ( 1983 ), Bacciagaluppi ( 1993 ), Redhead ( 1994 ), and a caustic Maudlin ( 2005 ). Putnam ( 2005 , p. 625) has admitted this frankly. Charitably speaking, the best quantum logic can achieve is to block the deductive road to some paradoxical answers to questions evoked by quantum mechanics. The central problems of interpretation of quantum mechanics (reality problem, locality problem, completeness problem) can however not be solved or dissolved by replacing classical logic with quantum logic. Consequently, philosophers have lost interest in quantum logic.

The interest of Birkhoff & Von Neumann resided in the structure of the lattice of projectors on Hilbert-space, which projectors were connected to so-called experimental propositions , used to report measurement-outcomes—as Von Neumann had already obeserved in his Grundlagen (1932). The quantum propositional logic that seemed to emerge, however, lacked both a conditional and a consequence relation; and a natural extension to predicate logic was not in sight. These last-mentioned features were au fond the reason why quantum logic has not been taken seriously by logicians (the central business of Logic being: what follows from what, and how). Only algebraists interested in lattice theory payed attention to it—small wonder that Birkhoff ( 1940 ) inaugurated lattice theory officially with the very first monograph on the subject, with a title that leaves no room for misinterpretation what the monograph is about: Lattice Theory . Thus via quantum logic, quantum mechanics has had little if any influence on (the development of) logic in the Twentieth century.

Nonetheless serious attempts have been made to extend Birkhoff & Von Neumann’s work to a full-blown deductive system, with a conditional and a consequence relation. The classic two-volume anthology Hooker ( 1975 ) bears testimony to the interest in quantum logic. More recent, Nishimura ( 1994 ) proposed proof theory for quantum logic, and Elgy and Tompits ( 1999 ) Gentzen-like methods (see further Giuntini et al. 2004 ; Engesser et al. 2009 ). We also would like to mention Baltag and Smets ( 2005 ) on ‘quantum actions’. Finally worth to mention is Landsman’s employment of topos theory to provide a new mathematical characterisation of quantum mechanics with Copenhagen overtones (‘Bohrification’), which mathematical structure generates nothing less than an intuitionistic quantum logic (see Landsman’s ( 2017a ) tome of nearly 900 pages, Chapter 12).

Quantum logic has never died, its philosophical interest has died, almost.

6 Influence on Metaphysics

The notorious interpretation problems of quantum mechanics are philosophical problems: more specifically, metaphysical problems (see Muller 2015 ). The reality problem of quantum mechanics resides in metaphysical territory. The growing interest in Analytic Philosophy in metaphysics since the 1960s , a.k.a. analytic metaphysics, had nothing to do with quantum mechanics and its philosophical problems—but more with the decline of logical positivism and the rise of realism in phlosophy of science. In Every Thing Must Go ( 2011 ), Ladyman and Ross ferociously criticised the lack of influence of scientific achievements generally on analytic metaphysics:

The result has been the rise to dominance of projects in analytic metaphysics that have almost nothing to do with (actual) science. Hence there are now, once again, esoteric debates about substance, universals, identity, time, properties, and so on, which make little or no reference to science, and worse, which seem to presuppose that science must be irrelevant to their resolution. They are based on prioritizing armchair intuitions about the nature of the universe over scientific discoveries.

Ladyman and Ross proclaim naturalising metaphysics, just as Quine had proclaimed naturalising epistemology, which boiled down to replacing it with cognitive psychology, clouded in vapor mumbling that philosophy ‘is continuous’ with science. Resounding echoes of logical positivism to be sure. “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough”, Quine quipped. On behalf of Ladyman and Ross, one could say: philosophy of physics is metaphysics enough. In recent decades, various philosophers, analytic metaphysicists and philosophers of science, have engaged in naturalised metaphysics. The annual conferences of the Society for the Metaphysics of Science in the USA (since 2016) are tokens of it; for literature, see for example Schrenk ( 2017 ). Ironically, because the endeavour to interpret quantum mechanics has lived in metaphysical territory since its inception, it has been a piece of very naturalised metaphysics, and therefore the call to naturalise metaphysics is partly an invitation to analytic metaphysicists to acknowledge this very fact.

Some exceptions include Wilson ( 2020 ), who relates the nature of contingency to Everett’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, Pashby ( 2013 , 2016 ) on persistence and temporal parts, Maudlin ( 1998 ) on mereology and quantum mechanics; see also Maudlin ( 2010 ) and Morganti ( 2020 ) for serious interaction between metaphysics and philosophy of physics.

There remain issues in analytic metaphysics that seem beyond naturalising, such as whether abstract objects exist, ‘absolute generality’ is a coherent concept, and all logically possible worlds exist ( pace DeWittified Everett). Ladyman and Ross proposed that we should stop thinking about these issues, where no progress has been made and can be made: a hopeless waste of brain power, which could be employed for so many better things in life.

All in all, on the one hand, the endeavour to interpret quantum mechanics has been metaphysical in nature from its inception, and therefore quantum mechanics did have an influence on metaphysics, but its influence was restricted to feeding philosophy of physics. On the other hand, analytic metaphysics has proceeded without any influence by quantum mechanics until recently, with the advent of naturalised metaphysics and ‘the metaphysics of science’ movement. Whether quantum mechanics ought to have more influence in metaphysics: that depends on the metaphysical issue at hand. Even if you cherish a modest ambition for metaphysics, such as Lowe’s ( 1998 ) ambition of erecting and analysing a framework of general concepts that are used and presupposed by all scientific disciplines, from physics to history and from biology to sociology, and therefore needs to be independent of the specific contents of the achievements in all those disciplines, then an occasional serious look at science, in particular at quantum physics, is needed to ensure that the erected and analysed framework of general concepts will cover the achievements of quantum physics too.

7 Influence on Ethics

When we subsume the issue of free will in Ethics, then some might think that quantum mechanics bears on this very issue in the light of ‘The Free Will Theorem’, by Conway and Kochen ( 2006 ), which claims that quantum mechanics ensures that we have free will. An enduring debate since Augustine of Hippo (Fifth Century) scratched his head about Predestination and the Lord’s imperative to lead a moral life in order to go to Heaven, has been finally decided, after Fifteenth centuries, by quantum mechanics?

The theorem of Conway and Kochen, which is just another version of Bell’s celebrated theorem, essentially proves that, for the entangled two-particle system in the usual Bell set-up, a local deterministic model plus the assumption that Alice an Bob are free to set their spin-measurement apparatus in any direction they want to is incompatible with quantum mechanics. Landsman ( 2017b ) has argued that the notion of free will surreptitiously employed by Conway and Kochen is Lewis’ ‘local miracle compatibilism’, so that in Landsman’s view, the ‘Free Will Theorem’ “challenges compatibilist free will à la Lewis (albeit in a contrived way via bipartite EPR-type experiments), falling short of supporting libertarian free will.” If and when this claim remains standing, we can expect some influence of quantum mechanics on the free will issue in Ethics. But for now, we must conclude that quantum physics has had no influence on the free will debate. Again, consult any recent companion or anthology on free will: quantum mechanics is absent.

Another intrusion of Ethics in the philosophical discourse about quantum mechanics worth mentioning is Lewis’ ( 2004 ) rejection of the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics on ethical grounds. For this interpretation makes one accept the existence of an infinity of worlds with each world having numerous counterparts of some or several human beings on counterpart Earth suffering intensely (due to low but non-zero probabilities of terrible events happening). Such an infinite increase in suffering no one ought to accept. So Ethics has had some influence on the philosophical discourse on quantum physics. In recent years, ethical considerations have become more vocal in discussions about the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Finally, worthy of mention is Ismael’s book How physics makes us free ( 2016 ), a panegyric on compatibilism which mostly concerns classical physics.

8 Influence on Philosophy of Science

After the great debates in general philosophy of science about the scientific method and the rationality of science in mid-twentieth century (Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Laudan), philosophy of science grew new sub-branches, notably philosophy of physics, of biology, and of economics. Quantum mechanics did have some influence on the realism debate. As an illustration of the under-determination thesis, quantum mechanics is second to none: it has empirically equivalent rivals in the De Broglie-Bohm theory and the theory of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber. On top of this, the many interpretations of quantum mechanics are a thorn in the realist’s flesh: if the aim of science is to provide, by means of its theories and models, a literally true description of reality, then the part of reality that quantum mechanics is about seems out of the reach of science. Rather than conclude that quantum mechanics makes science fail, perhaps it would be better to have a view of science that sets aims for science that can be reached and have been reached, also by quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics has been invoked in the realism debate in philosophy of science, and rarely has it been to strenghten the realist’s case, as Van Fraassen’s book on quantum mechanics bears witness ( 1991 ).

Van Fraassen’s ( 1970 , 1972 ) state-space version of the semantic view on scientific theories was inspired by Beth’s application of logical semantics to quantum theory and by quantum logic, which shows an indirect influence of quantum physics on philosophy of science.

Last but not least, I want write down some snarky sentences about Healey’s recent book The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy ( 2017 ). The title suggests that nothing less than a revolution has taken place in philosophy, due to quantum mechanics. Say what ?! Most of the topics Healey treats belong to philosophy of science (theories, models, representation, probability, explanation, objectivity), and some of them belong to metaphysics (causation, fundamentality). Healey claims that quantum mechanics has changed ‘our’ view of the topics mentioned above between brackets. On closer inspection, and careful reading, what the claim boils down to is that not quantum mechanics, but that quantum mechanics plus Healey’s pragmatist interpretation has motivated Healey to adopt new views on the mentioned philosophical issues. Well, as soon as a substantial majority of philosophers subscribes to Healey’s pragmatist views, we can welcome Healey as the prophet of a revolution in philosophy. Hail Healey! Which presumably will not happen. That quantum mechanics has influenced the philosophical views of Healey shows that quantum physics stricto sensu has influenced philosophy, because Healey is a philosopher. Presumably there will be others like him, in this regard, in particular philosophers of physics when they engage with general philosophy of science. But that’s about it.

9 Recapitulation

Although quantum physics has influenced philosophy in the sense that it has grown a new flourishing and blossoming branch of the tree of philosophy, apart from some recent contact between philosophy of physics and metaphysics, quantum physics has had hardly any influence on philosophy at all, and at best some influence on metaphysics, mostly in recent times. With regard to prominent issues intensely thought about by philosophers, such as those on the Chalmers–Bouget list, we dare conclude that it is difficult to see how quantum physics could bear on those issues. If it cannot, it ought not, for ought implies can.

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Acknowledgements

Suggestions, comments and corrections by Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge), Dennis Dieks and Guido Bacciagaluppi (Utrecht), and two anonymous Referees are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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Muller, F.A. The Influence of Quantum Physics on Philosophy. Found Sci 28 , 477–488 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09725-6

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Accepted : 01 December 2020

Published : 03 May 2021

Issue Date : March 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09725-6

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Ab Initio Computations Of Structural Properties In Solids By Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo , Siyuan Chen

Constraining Of The Minerνa Medium Energy Neutrino Flux Using Neutrino-Electron Scattering , Luis Zazueta

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Broadband Infrared Microspectroscopy and Nanospectroscopy of Local Material Properties: Experiment and Modeling , Patrick McArdle

Edge Fueling And Neutral Density Studies Of The Alcator C-Mod Tokamak Using The Solps-Iter Code , Richard M. Reksoatmodjo

Electronic Transport In Topological Superconducting Heterostructures , Joseph Jude Cuozzo

Inclusive and Inelastic Scattering in Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions , Amy Filkins

Investigation Of Stripes, Spin Density Waves And Superconductivity In The Ground State Of The Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model , Hao Xu

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AC & DC Zeeman Interferometric Sensing With Ultracold Trapped Atoms On A Chip , Shuangli Du

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Dihadron Beam Spin Asymmetries On An Unpolarized Hydrogen Target With Clas12 , Timothy Barton Hayward

Excited J-- Resonances In Meson-Meson Scattering From Lattice Qcd , Christopher Johnson

Forward & Off-Forward Parton Distributions From Lattice Qcd , Colin Paul Egerer

Light-Matter Interactions In Quasi-Two-Dimensional Geometries , David James Lahneman

Proton Spin Structure from Simultaneous Monte Carlo Global QCD Analysis , Yiyu Zhou

Radiofrequency Ac Zeeman Trapping For Neutral Atoms , Andrew Peter Rotunno

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

A First-Principles Study of the Nature of the Insulating Gap in VO2 , Christopher Hendriks

Competing And Cooperating Orders In The Three-Band Hubbard Model: A Comprehensive Quantum Monte Carlo And Generalized Hartree-Fock Study , Adam Chiciak

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Experiments And Theory On Dynamical Hamiltononian Monodromy , Matthew Perry Nerem

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Insulator To Metal Transition Dynamics Of Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films , Scott Madaras

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Beyond the Standard Model: Flavor Symmetry, Nonperturbative Unification, Quantum Gravity, and Dark Matter , Shikha Chaurasia

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Interfacial Forces of 2D Materials at the Oil–Water Interface , William Winsor Dickinson

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Topics in Proton Structure: BSM Answers to its Radius Puzzle and Lattice Subtleties within its Momentum Distribution , Michael Chaim Freid

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A Measurement of Nuclear Effects in Deep Inelastic Scattering in Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions , Anne Norrick

Applications of Lattice Qcd to Hadronic Cp Violation , David Brantley

Charge Dynamics in the Metallic and Superconducting States of the Electron-Doped 122-Type Iron Arsenides , Zhen Xing

Dynamics of Systems With Hamiltonian Monodromy , Daniel Salmon

Exotic Phases in Attractive Fermions: Charge Order, Pairing, and Topological Signatures , Peter Rosenberg

Extensions of the Standard Model Higgs Sector , Richard Keith Thrasher

First Measurements of the Parity-Violating and Beam-Normal Single-Spin Asymmetries in Elastic Electron-Aluminum Scattering , Kurtis David Bartlett

Lattice Qcd for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: Short Range Operator Contributions , Henry Jose Monge Camacho

Probe of Electroweak Interference Effects in Non-Resonant Inelastic Electron-Proton Scattering , James Franklyn Dowd

Proton Spin Structure from Monte Carlo Global Qcd Analyses , Jacob Ethier

Searching for A Dark Photon in the Hps Experiment , Sebouh Jacob Paul

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

A global normal form for two-dimensional mode conversion , David Gregory Johnston

Computational Methods of Lattice Boltzmann Mhd , Christopher Robert Flint

Computational Studies of Strongly Correlated Quantum Matter , Hao Shi

Determination of the Kinematics of the Qweak Experiment and Investigation of an Atomic Hydrogen Møller Polarimeter , Valerie Marie Gray

Disconnected Diagrams in Lattice Qcd , Arjun Singh Gambhir

Formulating Schwinger-Dyson Equations for Qed Propagators in Minkowski Space , Shaoyang Jia

Highly-Correlated Electron Behavior in Niobium and Niobium Compound Thin Films , Melissa R. Beebe

Infrared Spectroscopy and Nano-Imaging of La0.67Sr0.33Mno3 Films , Peng Xu

Investigation of Local Structures in Cation-Ordered Microwave Dielectric a Solid-State Nmr and First Principle Calculation Study , Rony Gustam Kalfarisi

Measurement of the Elastic Ep Cross Section at Q2 = 0.66, 1.10, 1.51 and 1.65 Gev2 , YANG WANG

Modeling The Gross-Pitaevskii Equation using The Quantum Lattice Gas Method , Armen M. Oganesov

Optical Control of Multi-Photon Coherent Interactions in Rubidium Atoms , Gleb Vladimirovich Romanov

Plasmonic Approaches and Photoemission: Ag-Based Photocathodes , Zhaozhu Li

Quantum and Classical Manifestation of Hamiltonian Monodromy , Chen Chen

Shining Light on The Phase Transitions of Vanadium Dioxide , Tyler J. Huffman

Superconducting Thin Films for The Enhancement of Superconducting Radio Frequency Accelerator Cavities , Matthew Burton

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Ac Zeeman Force with Ultracold Atoms , Charles Fancher

A Measurement of the Parity-Violating Asymmetry in Aluminum and its Contribution to A Measurement of the Proton's Weak Charge , Joshua Allen Magee

An improved measurement of the Muon Neutrino charged current Quasi-Elastic cross-section on Hydrocarbon at Minerva , Dun Zhang

Applications of High Energy Theory to Superconductivity and Cosmic Inflation , Zhen Wang

A Precision Measurement of the Weak Charge of Proton at Low Q^2: Kinematics and Tracking , Siyuan Yang

Compton Scattering Polarimetry for The Determination of the Proton’S Weak Charge Through Measurements of the Parity-Violating Asymmetry of 1H(E,e')P , Juan Carlos Cornejo

Disorder Effects in Dirac Heterostructures , Martin Alexander Rodriguez-Vega

Electron Neutrino Appearance in the Nova Experiment , Ji Liu

Experimental Apparatus for Quantum Pumping with a Bose-Einstein Condensate. , Megan K. Ivory

Investigating Proton Spin Structure: A Measurement of G_2^p at Low Q^2 , Melissa Ann Cummings

Neutrino Flux Prediction for The Numi Beamline , Leonidas Aliaga Soplin

Quantitative Analysis of Periodic Breathing and Very Long Apnea in Preterm Infants. , Mary A. Mohr

Resolution Limits of Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry with Pulsed Source , Guangzhi Qu

Solving Problems of the Standard Model through Scale Invariance, Dark Matter, Inflation and Flavor Symmetry , Raymundo Alberto Ramos

Study of Spatial Structure of Squeezed Vacuum Field , Mi Zhang

Study of Variations of the Dynamics of the Metal-Insulator Transition of Thin Films of Vanadium Dioxide with An Ultra-Fast Laser , Elizabeth Lee Radue

Thin Film Approaches to The Srf Cavity Problem: Fabrication and Characterization of Superconducting Thin Films , Douglas Beringer

Turbulent Particle Transport in H-Mode Plasmas on Diii-D , Xin Wang

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Ballistic atom pumps , Tommy Byrd

Determination of the Proton's Weak Charge via Parity Violating e-p Scattering. , Joshua Russell Hoskins

Electronic properties of chiral two-dimensional materials , Christopher Lawrence Charles Triola

Heavy flavor interactions and spectroscopy from lattice quantum chromodynamics , Zachary S. Brown

Some properties of meson excited states from lattice QCD , Ekaterina V. Mastropas

Sterile Neutrino Search with MINOS. , Alena V. Devan

Ultracold rubidium and potassium system for atom chip-based microwave and RF potentials , Austin R. Ziltz

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Enhancement of MS Signal Processing for Improved Cancer Biomarker Discovery , Qian Si

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Applications of Holographic Dualities , Dylan Judd Albrecht

A search for a new gauge boson , Eric Lyle Jensen

Experimental Generation and Manipulation of Quantum Squeezed Vacuum via Polarization Self-Rotation in Rb Vapor , Travis Scott Horrom

Low Energy Tests of the Standard Model , Benjamin Carl Rislow

Magnetic Order and Dimensional Crossover in Optical Lattices with Repulsive Interaction , Jie Xu

Multi-meson systems from Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics , Zhifeng Shi

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Dark matter in the heavens and at colliders: Models and constraints , Reinard Primulando

Measurement of Single and Double Spin Asymmetries in p(e, e' pi(+/-,0))X Semi-Inclusive Deep-Inelastic Scattering , Sucheta Shrikant Jawalkar

NMR study of paramagnetic nano-checkerboard superlattices , Christopher andrew Maher

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Researchers create entangled quantum magnets with protected quantum excitations

by Aalto University

When different quantum states combine, new collective states of matter can emerge. In the quantum realm, combining components such as atoms that possess quantum effects can give rise to macroscopic quantum states of matter, featuring exotic quantum excitations that do not exist anywhere else.

In a collaboration between Aalto University and the Institute of Physics CAS, researchers built an artificial quantum material, atom by atom, from magnetic titanium on top of a magnesium oxide substrate. They then carefully engineered how atoms interacted inside the material with the goal of birthing a new state of quantum matter.

Jose Lado, assistant professor at Aalto University, created the theoretical design to engineer the material featuring topological quantum magnetism, and a group led by associate professor Kai Yang at the Institute of Physics CAS built and measured the artificial material using atomic manipulation with scanning tunneling microscopy.

As a result, the researchers demonstrated for the first time a new quantum state of matter known as a higher-order topological quantum magnet. The topological magnet could represent a new way to achieve substantial protection against decoherence in quantum technology.

The research was published today in Nature Nanotechnology .

Beyond being interesting from the point of view of fundamental science, topological quantum many-body matter such as this new quantum magnet could have a groundbreaking impact on future quantum technologies.

"Creating a many-body topological quantum magnet makes it possible to explore an exciting new direction in physics. Excitations in topological quantum magnets have wildly different properties than those found in conventional magnets and could allow us to create new physical phenomena that are beyond the capabilities of current quantum materials," Lado says.

Quantum magnets are materials that realize a quantum superposition of magnetic states, bringing quantum phenomena from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale. These materials feature exotic quantum excitations–including fractional excitations where electrons behave as if they were split into many parts–that do not exist anywhere outside of this material.

To manipulate how the atoms behaved inside the quantum material the researchers had assembled, they poked each individual atom with a tiny needle. This technique allows for the accurate probing of qubits at the atomic level. The needle, in reality an atomically sharp metal tip, served to excite the atoms' local magnetic moment, which resulted in topological excitations with enhanced coherence.

"Topological quantum excitations, such as those realized in the topological quantum magnet we now built, can feature substantial protection against decoherence. Ultimately, the protection offered by these exotic excitations can help us overcome some of the most pressing challenges of currently available qubits," Lado says.

In their experiment, the researchers observed that the topological excitations were resistant to perturbations, a feature that was also predicted in Lado's theoretical design. The results also showed that the quantum coherence of the topological excitations was higher than their original individual components. This finding could point to a way of turning the researchers' artificial quantum material into a building block for quantum information that is protected from decoherence.

Journal information: Nature Nanotechnology

Provided by Aalto University

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