From Guitar Strings to Atoms: UVM Physicists Crack a 90-Year-Old Quantum Puzzle
Adapted from an article by SciTechDaily
A Local Team Tackles a Global Mystery
Imagine plucking a guitar string. At first the note is strong, but after a few seconds it fades into silence. Scientists have long had a name for that kind of fading motion: a damped harmonic oscillator.
Now imagine the same thing happening to an atom—an unimaginably small particle that obeys the strange rules of quantum physics. For almost a century, researchers tried to describe that fading motion at the quantum scale, but the math never quite worked out.
This summer, University of Vermont physicist Dennis Clougherty and his former student Nam Dinh solved the problem. Their work, published in Physical Review Research in July, is being called a breakthrough in one of the trickiest corners of physics.
📌 Sidebar: What’s a “Damped Oscillator”?
Everyday life: A swing that slows down or a guitar string that fades.
Why it matters in physics: It’s a simple way to describe how energy leaks out of vibrating systems.
The challenge at the quantum level: Atoms don’t like to give up their secrets, thanks to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
Everyday Motion vs. Quantum Weirdness
In our everyday world, fading motion makes sense. A swing slows down because of friction in the chains and air resistance. A guitar string quiets down because it gives off sound waves that carry energy away.
Atoms, though, play by different rules. At that tiny scale, scientists have to account for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the idea that you can’t know both an atom’s exact position and momentum at the same time. That principle kept tripping up anyone who tried to describe a “fading atom.”
That is, until two Vermonters gave it another look.
Solving a Puzzle Left on the Table Since 1900
The roots of the problem stretch back to Horace Lamb, a British physicist who, in 1900, described how a vibrating particle in a solid loses energy. His math worked in the classical world, but not in the quantum one that emerged later.
For decades, physicists tried to update Lamb’s work without breaking the uncertainty principle. Clougherty and Dinh cracked the code by using an advanced mathematical maneuver called a multimode Bogoliubov transformation.
In plain English: they found a new way to write the equations so that atoms could “fade” while still obeying quantum rules.
Why It Matters
So what’s the big deal? Beyond bragging rights for solving a 90-year-old problem, the UVM discovery could pave the way for ultra-precise measuring tools.
By reducing the uncertainty in an atom’s position, the research points toward devices that could measure distances or vibrations at scales far smaller than anything we can currently achieve.
A similar quantum trick—called a “squeezed state”—was key to the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of gravitational waves in 2017, where scientists measured ripples in spacetime that were thousands of times smaller than an atom’s nucleus.
📌 Sidebar: What This Could Mean for the Future
Quantum Sensors: Devices that measure tiny changes in motion, position, or energy with extreme precision.
Materials Science: Understanding how atoms lose energy could help design better semiconductors, batteries, or superconductors.
Space Science: The same math might be used in tools that detect faint signals from the cosmos, building on the methods used in gravitational wave observatories.
Vermont’s Role: With federal support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, UVM is placing Vermont squarely in the middle of cutting-edge quantum research.
A Vermont Connection
For Clougherty, who has taught physics at UVM since 1992, and for Dinh, who earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UVM and is now working on his PhD there, the discovery is a milestone.
“It’s not so obvious in the quantum regime how energy is lost when things vibrate,” Dinh explained. But thanks to their work, it’s now a lot clearer.
And it’s a reminder that groundbreaking science doesn’t just happen at MIT or Stanford—it happens in Burlington, too.