Decades ago, physicists discovered light and atoms making quantum jumps: a sudden switch from one energy state to another. This year, Stanford researchers caught sound doing it, too.
Scientists built a microscopic tuning fork and watched it go from holding a single phonon, the smallest possible unit of vibration, to none. It went from barely vibrating to completely still, in one step.
You can’t exactly see a quantum jump directly. The team used an algorithm to read a noisy stream of measurements and estimate when the vibration most likely vanished.
Here’s what we’re looking at. The top chart (A) shows when the jumps happened across many runs. On average, the vibration vanished after about 645 microseconds, nearly identical to the 649 the team measured a different way. In the bottom chart (B), the team tried to throw the algorithm off with wrong numbers, and the answer barely changed. That means the sound is really jumping.
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in Average Faces · The Catalog · №011, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.