Regardless of a publication date of April 1, this doesn’t look like some elaborate April Idiot’s science joke because it was first dropped at gentle final 12 months in Nature and Scientific American. From the livescience publication:
Greater than 20 years in the past, scientists predicted that at ultra-low temperatures, many atoms may bear ‘quantum superchemistry’ and chemically react as one. They’ve lastly proven it is actual.
Chemistry relies on warmth.
Atoms or molecules bounce round randomly, collide, and kind different molecules. At larger temperatures, atoms collide extra and the speed at which atoms grow to be molecules will increase. Under a sure temperature, the response will not occur in any respect.
However one thing very bizarre occurs on the lowest temperatures. On this excessive chilly, there’s primarily no warmth power, but chemical reactions occur quicker than they do at excessive temperatures.
The phenomenon is named quantum superchemistry. And it was lastly demonstrated final 12 months, greater than 20 years after physicists first proposed it.
In that experiment, College of Chicago physicist Cheng Chin and colleagues coaxed a gaggle of cesium atoms at just some nanokelvin into the identical quantum state. Amazingly, every atom didn’t work together individually. As an alternative, 100,000 atoms reacted as one, nearly instantaneously.
The primary demonstration of this bizarre course of has opened a window for scientists to higher perceive how chemical reactions function within the unusual realm of quantum mechanics, which governs the habits of subatomic particles. It additionally might assist to simulate quantum phenomena that traditional computer systems battle to mannequin precisely, resembling superconductivity.
However what occurs after that, as with so many advances in analysis, is difficult to foretell. Chin, for one, has no plans to cease learning this unusual type of chemistry.
The entire article is effectively value studying, even you probably have no concept what the realm of quantum mechanics is de facto all about, and delves deeply right into a particular state of matter referred to as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). That final sentence although instantly conjured up visions of Ice-9 from Kurt Vonnegut’s immortal traditional, Cat’s Cradle — let’s hope that’s not the place we find yourself right here on this courageous new world of Quantum Superchemistry!