7/27/2023 0 Comments Levitating magic trick![]() ![]() “It’s an interesting step outside of the usual things that we do,” Weisenberger said. Team members include John Musson, Frank Marhauser, Haipeng Wang, Wenze Xi, Brian Kross and Jack McKisson. Weisenberger says that the multidisciplinary approach will bring together their expertise as they branch out together into the less familiar territory of this LDRD project.īoth principal investigators remark that the project is moving forward well, thanks to the diligence and expertise supplied by every member of the team. Weisenberger’s team researches detector technology for nuclear physics research, whereas Dhakal’s work focuses on developing SRF cavities to accelerate electrons at high speeds. ![]() It has now shifted to a larger and more multi-disciplinary team led by Weisenberger and Dhakal, the current co-principal investigators. The project was conceived and launched by Rongli Geng in October 2021 before he transitioned to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This project, titled “SRF Levitation and Trapping of Nanoparticles Experiment,” is funded by the Laboratory Directed Research & Development program, which provides resources for Jefferson Lab personnel to make rapid and significant contributions to critical science and technology problems relevant to the mission of Jefferson Lab and the DOE. “And that could eventually lead to applications in quantum computing and quantum communications.” “Like storing information on a computer chip, the quantum state will stay and not dissipate,” Weisenberger said. A levitated particle in an SRF cavity that is under vacuum and chilled to super cold temperatures will only interact with the cavity’s electric field and not lose information to the outside, which is important for maintaining a quantum state. ![]() Intrinsic characteristics of SRF cavities will overcome some limits of laser trapping. “An electric field could go potentially beyond the capabilities of laser trapping,” Weisenberger said. But, the Jefferson Lab project team thinks that SRF cavities may provide a better tool for those researchers. Researchers are attempting to use a several-decades-old technique called “laser trapping”, as a step toward reliably imparting a quantum state on a particle suspended in a laser beam. They suspect that this unintentional levitation has impacted the performance of SRF cavity components. They think they have already unintentionally levitated unwanted and rare nanoparticles of metal, such as niobium and iron, inside SRF cavities during particle accelerator operations. The idea for this project came from observations of accelerator experts. “We want to know if we can trap and levitate particles inside the cavity using the electric field.” Exploring the Quantum with Accelerator Cavities “Storing quantum information on a levitated nanoparticle is our ultimate goal, but for now, it is a proof of principle experiment,” said Pashupati Dhakal, another principal investigator on the project and a staff scientist at Jefferson Lab in the Accelerator Operations, Research and Development Division. If the project team is able to levitate a particle, they might be able to then impart a quantum state on it by cooling the trapped particle to its lowest possible energy level (because that’s when quantum properties occur). This is a line drawing of an accelerator cavity that will be used in a proof of principle project that aims to levitate a tiny metallic particle, allowing it to store quantum information. ![]()
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