MIT, Harvard, and LBNL physicists have discovered a new quantum electronic material, the “kagome metal,” whose atomic structure resembles a Japanese basketweaving pattern and exhibits exotic, quantum behavior.
Source: mit.edu
You probably scratched your head last year if you read about time crystals, likely 2017’s most esoteric, widely covered popular science story. Even if you understood how they worked, you might not have known what use they could have. Time crystals, systems of atoms that maintain a periodic ticking behavior in the presence of an added electromagnetic pulse, have now piqued the interest of one well-funded government agency: the Department of Defense.
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Einstein’s objections to quantum mechanics began very early. Schrödinger’s version of the theory introduced a new mathematical entity, the wave function, which seemed to allow the position of an unmeasured particle to be spread out across an arbitrarily large region of space. When the particle’s position was measured, the wave function was said to ‘collapse’, suddenly becoming localised where the particle was detected.
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