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
00:26get from this molecule into this one if they can't knock into each other.
00:30But what these physicists showed, and this was based on some existing theories, but something
00:34that had never actually been proven before, is that the vacuum itself can transfer that heat.
00:41And the way it transfers the heat is, in quantum physics, a vacuum isn't really totally empty.
00:47There's always little particles appearing and then disappearing and then appearing and then
00:51disappearing. These are called quantum fluctuations. And they have some effects that they're very brief,
00:56but they turn out to be important. And if enough of those fluctuations line up in just the right way,
01:01where you sort of have one here, and it appears, and then one here, and it appears, it'll let that
01:06heat from one molecule jump across those fluctuations to the molecule on the other side of the vacuum.
01:11It's not something that's going to happen across a vast distance, because you're just not going to
01:15get enough of the fluctuations lined up in the right way. But across a small distance, the
01:20physicists showed you can actually make it happen. They showed this on a distance of a few hundred
01:25nanometers. That's only about the size of a virus, but it's actually much bigger than anyone had ever
01:30thought you'd be able to hopscotch heat in this way. And the way they made it work was they sort
01:35of had
01:35two very loose drums, two soft membranes on each side of the vacuum. And they had these optical imagers
01:41aimed at the drums. They were watching them vibrate. And they showed that given enough time,
01:47the heat from one of them would jump into the other. Down the road, the physicist told LiveScience,
01:52this could actually have some really important implications for building computers. One of
01:57the challenges with building faster and faster computers is that as they get faster, you have
02:01to pack more and more into smaller and smaller chips. And those chips get really hot, and there's
02:05no way to get rid of the heat. And what the physicist said was that you could actually use quantum
02:10vacuum. You could engineer this strange effect of the vacuum to dissipate heat more efficiently than
02:16any of the heat sinks that are available today. This isn't something that's just around the corner.
02:20It could take decades, even centuries, to get to the point where we're really using this effect.
02:25But it's an interesting idea. The other idea they raised is that these vibrations that are jumping
02:33across the vacuum, you can sort of think of them as quantum particles. They're what's called phonons,
02:39you know, little particles of vibration. And you could entangle the phonon in one membrane with
02:44the phonon in another membrane. And then they become qubits, the basic units of a quantum computer.
02:51And at that point, you could use them to store information, to send information around.
02:56We're nowhere near that happening. But if we did get to that point, the researchers said,
03:01it would put you in a position to store data in ways that we never have before, to store data
03:06more
03:06securely than we ever have before. And that presents some interesting opportunities.
Comments