Photo Credit: UNBC

By Sam Bennison

Science

UNBC assistant professor makes groundbreaking discovery in the field of quantum physics

Jul 5, 2024 | 5:00 AM

PRINCE GEORGE—A Physics professor at UNBC was part of a team of researchers who discovered something that was thought to not exist. In their paper titled “Experimental observation of repulsively bound magnons”, which was published in the journal Nature, they found that objects in a solid compound can be bound together despite repelling eachother. But what is a magnon?

“You can think of it as, like the needle of a compass. And then, you can think that some times that the needle can be in the wrong direction,” explains UNBC physics assistant professor Dr. Jean-Sébastien Bernier. “Let’s say that you have a lot of these needles and one is in the wrong direction. So, that would form a magnon.”

While magnons are known to occur naturally they do not want to appear next to each other and will repel as soon as possible, dissipating that energy. However when the researchers shone terahertz light waves to excite the spins in a material with the chemical composition of BaCo₂V₂O₈ they created magnon pairs that were bound together with nowhere for that energy to dissipate.

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A diagram of the magnons discovered in the BaCo2V2O8 compound (Photo Credit:Dr. Zhe Wang, Department of Physics, TU Dortmund, Germany)

“They remain next to each other for at least 18 picoseconds. So it’s a very short time. but it’s enough for the detection to occur,” continues Bernier. “And it was surprising that it exists because in a solid there’s supposed to be a lot of channels for dissipation. So, it should have been really easy to for this state to dissipate. But it turns out that we can observe it which was the big breakthrough.”

While uses for this breakthrough are theoretical it could have the potential to drastically increase privacy when telecommunicating.

“There’s this race going on right now about trying to find ways to communicate using quantum effects,” says Bernier. “It is possible that these bound state could be used to alter transport in spin chains, which is one of the possible devices that could that could be used for quantum telecommunication.”

For now, physicist will be on the hunt for more materials that contain these exotically bound objects.

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Email: sam.bennison@pattisonmedia.com