Quantum mechanics indicates that space is not empty at all. It is basically filled with quantum energy and particles that twinkle in and out of reality for a very short moment. These strange particles, just like signals, are well known as quantum fluctuations. For past few years, these fluctuations were only identified indirectly, but two years ago, physicists claimed to have identified these theoretical fluctuations directly.
Recently the same team of physicists said that they have accomplished another landmark by manipulating space itself and identifying the deviations in these strange signals in space. If confirmed after further clarifications, their experiment will truly be taking us to the region of high-level physics, meaning that the physicists might have just discovered a way to detect, probe, and test the quantum realm without disrupting it.
Probing and testing the quantum realm without disrupting it is very, important, because one of the main difficulties with quantum mechanics is that every time we measure and observe a quantum system, we, in fact, destroy it, which does not bode well when we want to tease out what's really is happening in the quantum world. Typically space is defined as; point completely lacking matter, with the lowest imaginable energy. There are no particles present in space, and nothing to affect the pure physics.
We all are familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a byproduct of this theory states that there is a border to how much we can understand quantum particles, and as a result, space is not empty, it's basically vivacious with its own strange energy and full of particle-antiparticle pairs that come into and out of existence arbitrarily. Now, these quantum fluctuations yield randomly fluctuating electric fields that can affect electrons, which is principally how researchers first indirectly discovered them back in the 1940s. In 2015, a team of physicists led by Alfred Leitenstorfer from the Konstanz University in Germany said that his team directly identified these fluctuations, by observing their effect on a light wave. The research was published in Science Journal.
The same team of researchers has taken their experiment to the higher level by 'squeezing' space and say they have been successful in identifying the strange variations in the quantum fluctuations as an outcome. This once again proves an indication of the reality of these quantum fluctuations and it also suggests that physicists can detect experiments in the quantum world without affecting the outcomes, which is something that would usually terminate the quantum state.
AlfredLeitenstorfer said, “We can analyze quantum states without altering them in the first approximation”.
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