Chinese scientists experimentally confirmed Niels Bohr's correctness in his debate with Einstein

Physicists from China conducted an experiment proposed by Albert Einstein almost a hundred years ago and obtained a result that confirmed Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. This was reported by UNN with reference to Phus Org, transmits UNN.

Details

When Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr met at physics conferences, they liked to relax and argue about quantum mechanics. At the 1927 Solvay Conference, Einstein proposed a thought experiment that he believed would show a contradiction in the principle of complementarity. This principle states that certain properties of particles, such as position and momentum, cannot be precisely measured simultaneously.

Einstein believed that in a double-slit experiment, both the particle and wave nature of particles could be observed simultaneously. Bohr, on the other hand, argued that there are properties of particles that cannot be measured simultaneously.

The experiment was conducted by a team led by Jian-Wei Pan from the University of Science and Technology of China. A photon was used as the particle, and a single rubidium atom, trapped by optical tweezers, served as the "slit."

The atom was cooled to its ground state and used as an ultralight beam splitter. Its momentum was quantum entangled with the photon's momentum. By changing the depth of the optical trap, the scientists controlled the uncertainty of the atom's momentum. As a result, the interference fringes became more or less blurred – exactly as Bohr predicted.

Recall

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