Key Points
- Scientists have found a way to “kick” a quantum system without it heating up.
- This challenges the everyday experience that work always produces heat.
- The system enters a strange state called “many-body dynamical localization.”
- This is caused by a delicate quantum property called “coherence,” which protects the system.
In a surprising discovery that seems to defy the normal rules of physics, scientists have found a way to “kick” a quantum system without it heating up. The experiment, carried out by a team at the University of Innsbruck, challenges our everyday intuition that doing work on something, like rubbing your hands together, always makes it hotter.
Published in Science, the researchers started with a super-cold gas of atoms, cooled to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. They then zapped this gas with a “kicked” landscape made of laser light. Normally, you would expect the atoms to absorb energy from the laser and start flying all over the place, heating up in the process.
But that’s not what happened. After a brief initial jolt, the atoms just… stopped absorbing energy. Their motion “froze,” and the system’s energy flatlined, even though the laser was continuously kicking it. The system had entered a strange quantum state known as “many-body dynamical localization.”
“We had initially expected that the atoms would start flying all around,” said the study’s lead author, Yanliang Guo. “Instead, they behaved in an amazingly orderly manner.”
The key to this strange behavior is “quantum coherence,” a delicate property that only exists at the quantum level. This coherence effectively protects the system from heating up. When the researchers disturbed this coherence by adding a little bit of randomness to the laser kicks, the system immediately started to heat up as expected.
This discovery is more than just a scientific curiosity. Understanding how to prevent quantum systems from heating up is a crucial step toward building better, more stable quantum computers, which are notoriously fragile and prone to errors caused by heat.
