Physicists solve 90-year-old puzzle of quantum damped harmonic oscillators

Physicists solve 90-year-old puzzle of quantum damped harmonic oscillators

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic oscillators" and are well understood in terms of Newton's laws of motion.

Scientists solve 90-year-old mystery in quantum physics

When a guitar string is plucked or a playground swing is set in motion, the movement gradually fades away. Physicists call these “damped harmonic oscillators,” and Newton’s laws do a fine job of explaining them in the everyday world. But when you shrink that picture down to the scale of atoms, the rules change—completely. The strange behavior of the quantum realm doesn’t bend to Newtonian logic, and for nearly a century, scientists have wrestled…