4/19/2023 0 Comments Quantum leap meaning![]() ![]() “Funnily enough, I wasn’t really the science geek in school. However, his path to a PhD at Wits University might have been an unlikely one had it not been for a few timely influences and chance conversations while growing up. It’s that process that’s kind of interesting for me – the fact that I can come up with my own questions, or ask them and find answers.”Īt 28, Nape has already made an indelible mark on the world of quantum optics. “Whether the answer is right or wrong, you always get something out. You have a nice question, or you observe something in nature, and then you start to build ideas around it,” Nape said. You kind of do physics like a philosopher. “You really have to be sharp-minded and apply yourself. Planck showed that energy, in certain situations, can exhibit characteristics of physical matter. Quantum mechanics has attracted the glitterati of scientists since the 1920s, when German physicist Max Planck published a groundbreaking study on the effect of radiation on a “black body” substance. ![]() Quantum physics suited his inquisitive mind and a high threshold for concentration. It wasn’t the white lab coats or a freakish streak that lured Nape down this path of light. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications. Nape an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. “And with that technique we have reduced the number of measurements significantly.” 25 February 2022: Wits PhD student Isaac Nape inside one of the labs at the physics building at the WITS University. “We devised a very simple technique that looks at the correlations between these two photons by projecting on specific patterns, which we structured in a specific way,” Nape said. ![]() Quantum optics studies the effects light has on photons. Quantum physics investigates matter and energy at its most fundamental level – one particle, respectively a photon or electron. With Nape’s new technique, information is gained in a matter of minutes, in essence asking an object: “Are you quantum or not?” To put that into perspective, using traditional methods to unravel a 100-dimensional state would take decades. Nape and the team, which includes colleagues at Wits University Andrew Forbes, Jonathan Leach and his postdoctoral student Feng Zhu, developed a new approach to quantum measurement, testing it on a 100-dimensional quantum entangled state. The technique that Nape developed is now spoken of with astonishment for the tremendous amounts of time and effort it could save scientists experimenting in the field of quantum optics. It’s a study so important that it was published in renowned scientific journal Nature Communicationsin August last year. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s because it is – even in the enlightened field of quantum optics. The team did this by revealing the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. Isaac Nape is a PhD graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand and lead investigator in a crack team of quantum physicists who may have cut years off painstaking laboratory work. Perhaps because not so long ago, if you grew up in a township west of Johannesburg, it was difficult to imagine being a quantum scientist – let alone one who devises a technique so significant it could change the trajectory of quantum optics for good. The idea of a quantum scientist being a balanced, softly spoken young black man with a love for music and a gift for dancing didn’t quite fit the script. Movies and books sold us the idea that quantum mechanics was inaccessible to everyone but the oddballs whose genius shone through bad skin and an overactive metabolism. We assumed they debated quantum mechanics for mains and probed photons for dessert like the cast of Big Bang Theory. Popular depictions of scientists as either dark and twisted geniuses or wildly eccentric white men with a penchant for world domination have done little to advance the image of lab geeks everywhere.Īs the casual name-calling suggests, quantum scientists were thought of as socially inept and awkward to be around. High-dimensional quantum code cracker: ‘I can observe all these fundamental properties of quantum mechanics with simple lasers,’ says Dr Isaac Nape in his Wits lab. ![]()
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