Twenty-five years of analogue quantum simulation

Hideki Matsumoto

Dominik Hangleiter, Jacques Carolan, Karim P. Y. Thébault

Anthony J. Bracken, G.F. Melloy

Forty-five years after the discovery of the peculiar quantum effect known as `probability backflow', and twenty years after the greatest possible size of the effect was characterized, an experiment has been proposed recently to observe the effect in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Here the history is described in non-technical terms.

Nigel G. Stocks, Colin John Lambert, P. V. E. McClintock

Joana Fraxanet, Tymoteusz Salamon, Maciej Lewenstein

Wolfgang Ernst Friederich Pauli

Abstract The modern version of quantum theory—now known as “quantum mechanics”— was born and grew to maturity in just five years, between 1925 and 1930. More was accomplished during those five years than in the preceding twenty-five years, or, for that matter, in the seventy years that have followed. Progress before 1925 was constantly hampered by conceptual doubts. Paradoxes such as the wave-particle duality—the contradiction between the Einstein particle theory of light and the classical wave theory—were disturbing and limiting. But by 1925 these difficulties had, perhaps from familiarity, become less inhibiting. Theorists stopped worrying about the conceptual strangeness of the quantum realm, and began to make a new physics with the strangeness incorporated in it. Once the conceptual barriers were passed, progress was astonishingly rapid. For those who had the vision, it was as if a great fog had lifted. Suddenly it was possible to see in many directions with a clarity no one could have anticipated.