The day is still far away when, emulating the famous ‘Doc’ from the filmReturn to the futureLet’s build a vehicle that allows us to move through time. However, advances in quantum physics bring us dizzyingly closer to a world in which what is seen is not what it seems and in which fiction becomes reality. Now, an international group of scientists in which the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) participates has proposed an experiment to allow the transfer of information between past and future, taking advantage of the properties of the quantum vacuum.
The so-called quantum vacuum is a low-energy state in which there are no physical particles as we understand them, but which is full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves and virtual particles. A vacuum can be charged with energy and the relationship between particles and a vacuum is similar to the relationship between sound waves and the matter through which they travel. “Thanks to these fluctuations,it is possible to make the void entwined in time; that is to say, the vacuum that exists now and the one that will be in a later moment of time, present strong quantum correlations“, has affirmed Borja Peropadre, of the Institute of Fundamental Physics of the CSIC.
In his work, which is published in the magazinePhysical Review Letters, scientists have harnessed these quantum correlations using superconducting circuit technology. “Superconducting circuits allow us to reproduce the interaction between matter and radiation, but with an amazing degree of control. Not only do they allow us to control the intensity of the interaction between atoms and light, but also how long it lasts. Thanks to this, we have been able to amplify quantum effects that, otherwise, would be impossible to detect “, explained Carlos Sabín, director of the study.
In this way, by strongly interacting two atoms P (past) and F (future) with the vacuum of a quantum field at different instants of time, scientists have found thatP and F end up strongly intertwined. “It is important to note that it is not only that the atoms have not interacted with each other, but in a classical world, they would not even know of their mutual existence”, comment the researchers.
This connection through time could be used in the future asquantum memory. “By encoding the state of a P atom in the vacuum of a quantum field, we will be able to recover it after a while, in the F atom. That information of P, which is being ‘memorized’ by the vacuum, will then be transferred to the F atom without loss of information “, has concluded Peropadre.
