Smaller, cheaper, better: the table top science of the 21st century.
From plasma physics to quantum gravity, the table top is taking on Big Science in a Big way.
From plasma physics to quantum gravity, the table top is taking on Big Science in a Big way.
Particle accelerators are a story of increasing scale. Yet, with the discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland it is unclear what the return on investment from a larger collider will be.
Indeed, the main argument for building the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a 100 km colossus, is not that we might discover new physics that would, say, confirm supersymmetry or some other aspect of string theory (a theory you could never deny because they would just change the minimum masses of the particles to be just out of reach of the current collider). Rather, the argument is about understanding anti-matter, dark matter, or dark energy better.
The problem is that particle accelerators aren’t necessarily the best way to study those things (with the possible exception of anti-matter). But we don’t need a $20 billion new accelerator to study that. Indeed, Petawatt lasers, which are in the $10–100 million range can also create anti-matter as well as smaller accelerators. Meanwhile, dark matter is best left to dark matter detectors and dark energy to space-looking apparati.
There is reason to think, indeed, that more interesting physics can be discovered, not with massive, singular investments like the LHC or proposed FCC, but rather with investments in small, cheap, high risk, high payoff experiments that sit on a “table” (sometimes a very large one). These room-size experiments evoke the 18th or 19th century experiments of Cavendish, Faraday, Maxwell, and Mikelson and Morley, but they are far from being a relic of the past. In just the last 10 years, they have quietly made some startling discoveries such as finding exceptions of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, generating power from Brownian motion, achieving quantum supremacy (the unleashing of vast computing resources in specialized cases), and more.
This is not an article for or against building a larger supercollider, but rather a suggestion that table top experiments are widely under recognized for their out-sized contributions relative to Big Science and should be seen as a triumph of ingenuity when they can peel back some corner of the vast and mysterious universe.
In fact, given their collective physics output, they may outperform Big Science, which I define as large government funded programs costing billions and employing hundreds or thousands of people, in many areas of research from condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, materials science, quantum computing and information, gravity, and even quantum gravity.
Quantum gravitational experiments out of the University of Oxford for example propose measuring the effects of gravity on two particles in superposition with one another. The goal would be to detect entanglement of two tiny masses caused by gravitational interaction. All of this can be done in a tiny table top experiment. While there is no word that this experiment has been done despite being kicked around in the academic press 3 years ago, it may be possible in the near future.
Another exciting table top experiment last year at the University of Maryland simulated sending information through a traversible wormhole where information is passed in one end, scrambled in a quantum mishmash of particles, and then extracted from the other. Only the year before, it was thought that this experiment was an impossible thought experiment.
Also last year, meanwhile, the Moore foundation funded Stanford researchers $15 million to do a variety of table top experiments to probe minute details about quantum effects of entanglement and wave-particle duality that particle accelerators are not equipped to detect. This is because particle accelerators work by essentially smashing matter together at extremely high energy densities and relativistic speeds so that new particles and particle effects appear, but they aren’t equipped to carry out experiments that require precise kinds of particle interactions and subtle measurements. Two of the funded experiments will look at things like dark matter and gravitational waves while the 3rd, more interestingly, will look directly at how physics experiments are carried out and how they can be enabled for the future with a better, smaller, more precise mentality.
Many of these experiments rely on existing technologies rather than new, postdoc/grad-student fabricated tech that you will never see in a product catalog. For example, how to use the technology that powers MRI machines, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, to probe the details of dark matter by attempting to detect axions, a theoretical particle that is a leading candidate. Or using atom interferometry, developed in the 1990s, to detect gravitational waves in a table top experiment, which currently rely on massive arrays such as LIGO to detect, by looking at very long wavelength waves rather than the short ones that LIGO sees.
While many table top experiments that have been proposed will ultimately be built, tested, and fail to find any results, the fact that they are relatively cheap is a huge boon over multi-million or multi-billion dollar experiments that also have the potential to find nothing. While the 20th century was an era of big government funded research programs, the 21st is an era of smaller, faster, cheaper, and the payoff is clear. Science has to catch up.
Precision physics with 'tabletop' experiments | Stanford News
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