Quantum physics is a strange world that is difficult to understand. Those who have not yet encountered it can learn about one of these phenomena, which is negative time, which is somewhat contrary to the reality we know, through recent research conducted by the University of Toronto. We can predict that time seems to have sudden fluctuations at the subatomic level, but that does not mean that we still find ourselves in the world of Aladar Mezga and Kobuki.
Canadian researchers conducted the original experiment in 2022, and it was relatively simple: rubidium atoms were cooled to a temperature near absolute zero with pulses of light. The atoms absorbed the light, entered a higher-energy excited state, and then almost immediately returned to the lower-energy state after emitting a photon. The goal was to measure how quickly this process occurs, and how much delay can be measured between excitation and photon release. The result was different from what they expected in several ways.
Surprisingly, the atoms were excited even without absorbing the photon. The other is that the atoms released photons earlier than absorption occurred.
Leaving yesterday's ship
The last phenomenon is special negative time, and it is important to understand that a photon is a particle of light, but the nature of light is both a particle and a wave at the same time. In our case, it is worth imagining it as a wave drawn with a pencil, entering the rectangle representing the material and coming out slightly compressed on the other side. A light pulse is a wave packet made up of several wavelengths of light, so the circled wave is an average value. By interacting with matter, the wavelengths change, and the wavelength of the outgoing beam will also be different. A negative time means that the process is in a hurry, i.e. the peak of the outgoing wave appears before the peak of the incoming wave is absorbed. The strange thing is that what appears to be a vision supported by statistics usually turns out to be reality on a quantitative level. This is what happens here too.
Negative delay may seem like a paradox, but it means that if you built a quantum clock to measure how long atoms spend in an excited state under certain conditions, the clock would not move forward, but backwards
– explained Josiah Sinclair, one of the authors of the research that was presented by Scientific American, but has not yet been officially published.
All of this does not change what we know about time. According to scientists, since the photons did not carry information, causality, that is, physical causality, was not damaged, and the process did not exceed the maximum speed stipulated in the special theory of relativity, which is the speed of light. At the same time, the result showed that the material importance of time in the field of optics is greater than the attention it has received so far.
Researchers are currently trying to reproduce this strange phenomenon through more experiments and other materials.
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