00:00In a new experiment, physicists have shown that there's a new way for heat to cross a
00:04vacuum, for heat to actually leap across from one molecule to the next without any radiation,
00:10basically by kind of hopscotching across the vacuum itself.
00:18Under a normal model of physics, if you have one molecule on one side of the vacuum and
00:22one molecule on the other, and they're kind of vibrating, there's no way from the heat to
00:25get from this molecule into this one if they can't knock into each other. But what these
00:30physicists showed, and this was based on some existing theories, but something that had never
00:35actually been proven before, is that the vacuum itself can transfer that heat. And the way it
00:42transfers the heat is, in quantum physics, a vacuum isn't really totally empty. There's always little
00:48particles appearing and then disappearing and then appearing and then disappearing. These are called
00:52quantum fluctuations. And they have some effects that they're very brief, but they turn out to be
00:57important. And if enough of those fluctuations line up in just the right way, where you sort of have
01:02one here and it appears and then one here and it appears, it'll let that heat from one molecule
01:08jump across those fluctuations to the molecule on the other side of the vacuum. It's not something
01:12that's going to happen across a vast distance because you're just not going to get enough of
01:16the fluctuations lined up in the right way. But across a small distance, the physicists showed you can
01:22actually make it happen. They showed this on a distance of a few hundred nanometers. That's
01:26only about the size of a virus, but it's actually much bigger than anyone had ever thought you'd be
01:31able to hopscotch heat in this way. And the way they made it work was they sort of had two very loose
01:36drums, two soft membranes on each side of the vacuum, and they had these optical imagers aimed at
01:42the drums. They were watching them vibrate. And they showed that given enough time, the heat from one of
01:48them would jump into the other. Down the road, the physicist told Live Science, this could actually
01:53have some really important implications for building computers. One of the challenges with
01:58building faster and faster computers is that as they get faster, you have to pack more and more into
02:02smaller and smaller chips. And those chips get really hot and there's no way to get rid of the heat.
02:07And what the physicist said was that you could actually use quantum vacuum. You could engineer this
02:12strange effect of the vacuum to dissipate heat more efficiently than any of the heat sinks that are available today.
02:18This isn't something that's just around the corner. It could take decades, even centuries,
02:22to get to the point where we're really using this effect. But it's an interesting idea. The other idea
02:29they raised is that these vibrations that are jumping across the vacuum, you can sort of think of them
02:36as quantum particles. They're what's called phonons, you know, little particles of vibration. And you could
02:42entangle the phonon in one membrane with the phonon in another membrane. And then they become qubits, the
02:49basic units of a quantum computer. And at that point, you could use them to store information, to send
02:55information around. We're nowhere near that happening. But if we did get to that point, the
03:00researchers said, it would put you in a position to store data in ways that we never have before, to store data more
03:06securely than we ever have before. And that presents some interesting opportunities.
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