A Study About Nothing

Scientists find new ways to measure the infinitesimally small

fluctuations that exist in a vacuum.

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Abigail Malate, Staff Illustrator (Also created homepage composite image using a .gif
by TBH-1138)

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Copyright American Institute of Physics (reprinting information) (homepage image

license:CC BY-SA 3.0)
PHYSICS

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Yuen Yiu, Staff Writer

(Inside Science) -- A vacuum is a space absolutely devoid of matter, at least

according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But if you talk to a physicist
you may get a different answer. According to quantum physics, even vacuums
are not completely empty. Constant fluctuations in energy can spontaneously
create mass not just out of thin air, but out of absolutely nothing at all.

"It's like a boiling sea of appearing and disappearing particle pairs," said
James Koga, a theoretical physicist from the National Institutes for Quantum
and Radiological Science and Technology in Kyoto, Japan. The pairs, made up
of one particle and one antiparticle, exist for only moments. Koga is
investigating the subtle effects caused by these fluctuations.

This peculiar nature of vacuum, sometimes referred to as "quantum vacuum,"

is not just theoretical speculation. It has real, measurable effects on our
physical reality. Although these effects are usually far too small to impact even
the most sensitive instruments of today, scientists think the picture will
change for the miniaturized technologies of tomorrow.

"In the macroscopic world, we don't care about these forces at all. You
wouldn't care about it when you are driving a car for instance. It's totally
negligible," said Alejandro Manjavacas, a physicist specializing in photonics at
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "But in the context of
nanotechnology or nanophotonics -- at a super small scale, these effects will
start playing a role."

Although the concept of a fluctuating vacuum was theorized and proven

during the first half of the last century, scientists are still grappling with the
implications. Two recently published papers explore two separate aspects of
the same mystery -- what happens when there is nothing at all?

A glistening ocean
The energy fluctuation in vacuum can be explained by the uncertainty
principle of quantum physics. The principle, first introduced by German
physicist Werner Heisenberg, states that at any definite point in space, there
must exist temporary changes in energy over time. Sometimes this energy is
converted into mass, generating particle-antiparticle pairs.

Most of the time these newly born pairs recombine and vanish before
interacting with anything. Because of this, physicists like to refer to these pairs
as "virtual particles," but this doesn't mean they aren't real -- they just need
something to interact with to make their presence felt.

For this, Koga and his team envision a way to observe this boiling sea of
vacuum the same way we see glistening waves in the ocean -- with light. In
their latest paper, published in Physical Review Letters, they lay down the
theoretical groundwork needed for the experiment. Specifically, they want to
study photons that bounce off an atomic nucleus in a distinctive way that
wouldn’t happen without the "boiling" vacuum acting as the middleman. This
peculiar light phenomenon is known as Delbrück scattering, predicted by
German-American physicist Max Delbrück in 1933. The effect was later
observed experimentally in 1975 -- but just barely.

"[Scientists] could kind of guess that the Delbrück scattering was there, but it
was like if you include this effect in your calculation then it agrees more with
the data," said Koga.

Koga and his team hope to take Delbrück scattering to another level by
characterizing the phenomenon’s effect. It is as if scientists knew about air
resistance, but still needed to study it further so that engineers could use the
knowledge to build an airplane.

The task is tricky. To measure Delbrück scattering, one must shine light onto
trillions of atomic nuclei, which creates a problem. Photons bounce off nuclei,
electrons and even each other in all directions, via all kinds of different
interactions. How can one distinguish which photon is scattered from what?

Koga's team suggests that we use polarized gamma rays. Just like polarized
sunglasses can help you see better by filtering out unwanted solar glares,
polarized gamma rays can help scientists sift through the gazillions of photons
based on their polarization, in addition to energy and scattered angle. As long
as one knows where to look for the specific photons that are the results of
Delbrück scattering, one should be able to pick them out from the lineup.

"The point that we are trying to make in our paper is by using a new polarized
source, you can almost see the signal isolated," said Koga.

But there is just one problem -- such an instrument doesn't exist. At least not
yet.

Enter the future Extreme Light Infrastructure in Măgurele, Romania. This

facility will not only provide the polarized gamma rays Koga proposed, but will
make some of the brightest gamma rays in the world. This is important
because just like a brighter ambient light can shorten the exposure time for
taking a photo, a brighter gamma ray can shorten the run time for Koga's
proposed experiment.

Credit: ELI-NP Romania

Kazuo Tanaka, the scientific director of the Nuclear Physics division of the
future facility, is pleased with Koga's team's proposal.

"I think their proposal is very crystal clear. They calculated how many days of
shooting they need for the experiment, and came up with 76 days," he said. "I
think if they do the experiment we can have a very definitive measurement for
Delbrück scattering."

While the facility is still under construction, and will not be ready for the
experiment at least until 2019, a different group of physicists are studying the
same nothingness of vacuum, but with a different set of eyes. Instead of
beaming light into the vacuum and looking for a glint, physicist Alejandro
Manjavacas and his group at the University of New Mexico want to know if the
fluctuations of vacuum can actually exert an invisible force on physical objects
-- as if they were being moved by Jedis.

An invisible force

The video shows two plates moving towards each other in a vibrating pool of water, an
analogy to the Casimir effect that exist in a fluctuating vacuum. Credit: Denysbondar
The Casimir effect, named after Dutch physicist Henrik Casimir, describes the
force that pushes two objects together due to surrounding waves. The effect
exists for two beads on a vibrating string, or two boats in a wavy ocean, as well
as two particles in a fluctuating vacuum. Much like Delbrück scattering, the
Casimir effect was theorized in 1948 and has already been confirmed, in 1996.
So, what is left to be discovered?

"Most of the work that was done on Casimir effect was for systems that
weren't moving, or if they were moving, they were moving in a uniform
motion," said Manjavacas.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Manjavacas and his

colleagues calculated how the Casimir effect can nudge objects that are
already spinning and moving. Through calculations, they discovered that
when a tiny sphere spins near a flat surface, it will move as if it is rolling down
the surface, despite never making contact with it.

"If you try to make a nanostructure that involves moving parts that are very
close together, it is crucial to know what is going to be the effect from these
type of forces. You'll need to know whether it is going to cause the moving
parts to get stuck," said Manjavacas. "Or we can use these forces to our
advantage, such as using them to move objects or to force them to do the
things that we want."

In their study, the researchers evaluated the effect for spheres with diameters
ranging from 50 to 500 nanometers, much less than one hundredth the width
of a human hair. As expected, the relationship between the spinning and the
lateral movement isn't straightforward -- it depends on the speed that the
sphere is spinning, as well as the size of the sphere and the distance between
the sphere and the surface. These minute effects may soon be relevant on the
frontier of technology, for example when engineers