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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 13 2020, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the stringy-results dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

90 years ago, the physicist Hans Bethe postulated that unusual patterns, so-called Bethe strings, appear in certain magnetic solids. Now an international team has succeeded in experimentally detecting such Bethe strings for the first time. They used neutron scattering experiments at various neutron facilities including the unique high-field magnet of BER II* at HZB. The experimental data are in excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction of Bethe and prove once again the power of quantum physics.

The regular arrangement of atoms in a crystal allows complex interactions that can lead to new states of matter. Some crystals have magnetic interactions in only one dimension, i.e. are they magnetically one-dimensional. If, in addition, successive magnetic moments are pointing in opposite directions , then we are dealing with a one-dimensional antiferromagnet. Hans Bethe first described this system theoretically in 1931, predicting also the presence of excitations of strings of two or more consecutive moments pointing in one direction, so called Bethe strings.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference
Anup Kumar Bera, Jianda Wu, Wang Yang et al. Dispersions of many-body Bethe strings, Nature Physics (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41567-020-0835-7)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @11:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @11:13PM (#982292)

    I'm curious, if one of the base principles/behavior of Quantum mechanics is things can be in a superposition of states and collapsed to one of that states upon observation, could our reality actually be like that as well meaning all these "experiments" to prove certain theory is just forging our reality on-the-go by collapsing to those states that we want?

    IANAQP so this is just a layman's pondering - are we going down the rabbit hole here? The lock down is doing weird things to the mind.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @12:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @12:59AM (#982323)

    In the 60s and 70s (especially the 70s), it was very popular to pontificate on such things. Especially after Bell's Inequality and subsequent measurements in the late 60s. What you're talking about is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation [stanford.edu] of quantum mechanics. Twentieth century physics pretty much left the philosophers in the dust. To be on the cutting edge of philosophy used to mean being on the cutting edge of science, but by the later part of the century you had to be a very good mathematician and physicist to be on the bleeding edge. Philosophers who tried to keep up quickly showed their ignorance, and what good is a philosophical interpretation of science from someone if they didn't actually understand the science?

    In the early 70s, through works such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, there were parallels drawn between the new physics and the ancient eastern mysticism. The books were built up before the Standard Model was confirmed and from a physics standpoint, the books are simply wrong (although the author in reprints well into the 2000's, writes updated intros to the books that essentially ignore how everything after the first edition has been refuted); the books still apparently sell fine, however.

    If you really want to blow your mind, in the late 50s/early 60s Hugh Everett showed that another way to interpret quantum mechanics is that, when a state is in a superposition and you observe it, instead of the wavefunction suddenly collapsing to one state, as with the Copenhagen Interpretation, but the universe splits into parallel universes where both outcomes occur. This is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation [stanford.edu] of quantum mechanics. It sounds pretty strange, but Everett showed that interpretation is mathematically equivalent to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Everett never believed it, and he never did any other work in that area (I think it was his dissertation), but the science fiction writers and armchair philosophers went nuts!