《Quanta》杂志：2023年物理学的重大突破

文字记录:
说话人 1 00:12
This is one of the most mysterious sounds in the universe. A billion years ago, two black holes collided at nearly the speed of light. The violent explosion distorted the fabric of space time with ripples called gravitational waves. A Gravitational wave is literally the stretching and compressing of space time, as predicted by Einstein over 100 years ago, because mass actually bends space time and so if mass jiggles, space time jiggles as well. So Einstein predicted that there should be a way that gravitational waves exist, but he actually thought that there was no chance that anyone would ever detect them because they were so minuscule微不足道.

Then in 2015, scientists at a gravitational wave observatory known as LIGO had a breakthrough. We have detected gravitational waves. We did it.

说话人 2 01:05
We were super happy to be in the era of gravitational waves.

说话人 3 01:09
Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, and they carry information about the most extremely relativistic objects in the universe, including objects like black holes. So at higher frequencies, the ground based detectors like LIGO are doing a great job of measuring black holes at the solar mass or maybe hundred solar mass scale. But if you really want to measure the most massive black holes in the universe or even just different kinds of gravitational waves, you have to go to much much lower wavelengths.

说话人 1 01:39
For 15 years, an international coalition known as nanograph has been trying to detect gravitational waves at low frequencies using a technique called a pulsar timing array.

说话人 2 01:50
We use some of the largest radio telescopes in the world to measure a whole bunch of pulsars and hopefully to directly detect gravitational waves in the universe.

说话人 1 01:59
At the end of its life, a massive star gravitationally collapses into its core, becoming a neutron star.

说话人 3 02:05
A teaspoon of neutron star material can weigh as much as a mountain. So it’s incredibly dense.

说话人 1 02:12
Some neutron stars begin rotating rapidly, blasting out beams of radiation. These are pulsars.

说话人 3 02:18
The kinds of pulsars that we use are rotating as fast as a kitchen blender. So when it spins, that beam might actually get swung into our line of sight, kind of like a lighthouse灯塔. And whenever that beam springs past, we measure a radio pulse.

说话人 1 02:32
Gravitational waves can subtly alter the timing of those pulses.

说话人 3 02:36
A gravitational wave might come from outside of our galaxy. It will then jostle and wobble all of the space between the earth and the many pulsars that we look at. So we’ve effectively turned our little neighborhood of the Milky Way and the millisecond pulse stars in that neighborhood into one big detector through which gravitational waves can pass.

说话人 1 03:00
In June 2023, Nanograph released its 15 year data showing compelling evidence for the background hum of low frequency gravitational waves that pervades our universe.

说话人 2 03:11
We have strong evidence for the very first time of what we like to call the smoking gun of gravitational waves at this frequency Range. It looks like noise almost. It looks like a random signal. And yet when we correlate the signal with another pulsar on another pulse, on another pulsar, we can pull out this very distinctive correlation pattern that we call the Hellings and downs curve. And for us, it’s the fingerprint of the universe swirling in lots and lots of gravitational waves and adding together into this hum that we measure.

说话人 1 03:43
The most likely source of these waves are violent collisions of supermassive black holes. But physicists are hopeful for more exotic possibilities.

说话人 3 03:52
It seems strange to say it, but supermassive black holes might be the most mundane explanation for our signal.

说话人 2 03:58
We know that most galaxies have supermassive black holes, and we know that galaxies merge. But there’s zillion papers that have been put out by theorists already that are explaining this background in terms of like basic and new physics, the kind of beyond Standard Model physics, strings or new types of dark matter, all sorts of possibilities, and that would be super exciting.

说话人 1 04:26
In physics, one set of laws holds court. The laws of thermodynamics govern the flow of energy in the universe. The first law dictates that energy cannot be destroyed or created. The second says that as energy is transferred or more transformed, more and more of it is wasted. In 2008, Japanese physicist Masahiro Hota published a protocol that seemed to break both laws. It outlined a feat called quantum teleportation, the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air.

说话人 4 04:59
Many important researchers were looking at it skeptically, like thinking, how is that really true? Maybe there’s a mistake or a misunderstanding there. And it took a while for the community to realize, no, actually, Masahiro is that good and that clever. He’s actually finding something that is there that you’ve overlooked, and it’s so unintuitive that it took you a while to comprehend.

说话人 1 05:22
Now, 15 years later, two independent experiments have teleported energy across quantum devices, showing that Hoda’s protocol works. The results offer a rare window into the mysterious world of the quantum vacuum, the lowest energy state known to physics.

说话人 4 05:39
In our best models that we have to understand matter at the quantum level. Turns out that the matter that we see are excitations of something called quantum fields that basically tells you, oh, what you see and the particles that you see in particle physics are not really little spheres, right? Those things are excitations of quantum fields that are everywhere. If I get a magnifying glass and I look at this tiny amount of the room, the quantum feels still there. So the vacuum is full of motion in a way.

说话人 1 06:07
These constant fluctuations imbue the vacuum with a minimum amount of energy known as the zero point energy. A system with this minimal energy is in the ground state.

说话人 4 06:18
If you try to extract energy from the vacuum, if you do something, let’s say here, you try to extract energy on this side from the vacuum, you’re not going to be able to do it. You’re gonna have to pay a price because anything that you do to the ground state will excite the ground state, and that will cost you energy.

说话人 1 06:31
But how does quantum teleportation protocol unlocks a trick? Quantum fields are entangled, meaning that the fluctuations in one spot tend to match fluctuations in another spot. By exploiting this connection across space, Hoda’s protocol allows information to be sent without using energy.

说话人 4 06:50
But Masahiro thought is like, okay, fine. So here’s what we can do. We can actually, instead of trying to extract energy here, we are going to measure the FI here and write down the information that measurement cost you energy. But now you generated a bunch of information, classical information that you can write on a notepad, right? Or put on a USB stick. Now you send that information over to the other person. So this side of the room still looks like the vacuum. Locally, it looks like, well, nothing happened here. It didn’t do anything here. So Masahiro sends the information over to a person here and that person said, aha, sure, it is the vacuum what I’m looking at. But now I have information about it because these two parts happen to be entangled.

说话人 1 07:32
Following Hoda’s protocol, Martin Martinez and his team designed an experiment to teleport information between two carbon atoms in a quantum device. First, they fired radio pulses at the atoms, putting them into a minimum energy ground state with entanglement connecting them. Then they added a third atom, C, and fired a radio pulse at both a and C, measuring A’s position and transferring the information. Another pulse aimed at B and C transmitted the message to B and made a final measurement. The protocol took just 37 milliseconds to run in the lab. If the energy had traveled over these physical distances, it would have taken a full second.

说话人 4 08:15
This is how you know if it’s energy teleportation, because if you see energy moving faster than the time you would have taken to get there, then you know the energy never traveled. So it’s just the information that enabled it. We are showing that you can do a quantitary teleportation implementation in this particular setup, a nuclear magnetic resonance lab that every university would have, which means that it opens the door for applications of the protocol both in technology and in basic science.

说话人 1 08:50
Two years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope launched to LaGrange point 2, a million miles from earth. Since the first data from the telescope was unveiled, the only constant has been surprise.

说话人 5 09:03
The amount of detail and sensitivity of that data was just mind blowing. We knew immediately it was gonna be a paradigm shifting telescope just looking at the data.

说话人 6 09:16
The nude discoveries that we’re seeing with JWST have been so groundbreaking that our predictions are thrown out the window.

说话人 1 09:26
In 2023. The telescope’s observations continued to challenge our understanding of how familiar cosmic objects like stars, galaxies and black holes came to be.

说话人 6 09:37
Some of the most groundbreaking results from JWST over its first year and a half have been the finding of massive things at early times.

说话人 5 09:48
All of a sudden, there’s all of these really bright red objects that were simply completely invisible in Hubble, these red dots, are supermassive galaxies conveying signals from the beginning of the universe. And that is surprising, because at early times, we basically expect all objects to just be colliding into each other all the time. There’s something weird going on in terms of how objects are forming. There are really big things, really early things, that are the size of our Milky Way galaxy now, except a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang. So instead of having 14 billion years to form, they’ve had a couple hundred million.

说话人 6 10:35
We say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and these galaxies seem to have been built over a period of time that’s effectively like a day in cosmic history. And we have no idea how cosmology dictates that. Galaxies can only grow so fast. They’re limited by gas in giant halos that contain dark matter, and that gas form stars. And so we’re fundamentally limited by the process of star formation that we’ve come to understand. But when we find these exceptionally luminous, exceptionally massive systems so early, then it potentially could change the framework of cosmology itself.

说话人 5 11:21
The other thing that’s been very surprising is that supermassive black holes also seem to form much earlier and in much greater numbers than we had anticipated.

说话人 6 11:32
So there is an overabundance of black holes that weigh over a million times the mass of our sun. We have no idea how they formed.

说话人 5 11:42
They might form before the galaxies do. They might be the seeds from which the galaxies form. The universe is much weirder than anything that we can dream up.

说话人 1 11:52
In the coming years, astronomers are hoping to answer open questions about how supermassive black holes, galaxies and the first generation of stars formed alongside each other in the first few hundred million years of the universe.

说话人 6 12:06
The thing we’re really looking for is statistics. It’s no longer about single galaxies like this exceptionally luminous system or this really bizarre galaxy that we found. We want to find hundreds and thousands of them, and that can really teach us about the evolution of how they’re built over time. The new discoveries are just tip of the iceberg, and I think the next several years will be profoundly groundbreaking in terms of what we’re able to detect and piece together in terms of our own cosmic history.

说话人 5 12:45
Galaxies are the home of all planets, all stars, all black holes, all life. We don’t know how they form. We don’t know why we’re here. So we really are hoping to get answers to the fundamental questions that comprise our cosmic origin story, how we got here, from the beginning of cosmic time to now.