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MIT researchers have discovered that neutrons can bind to quantum dots using the strong force, a finding that opens new possibilities for probing material properties at the quantum level and advancing quantum information processing. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
The new finding may lead to useful new tools for probing the basic properties of materials at the quantum level, including those arising from the strong force, as well as exploring new kinds of quantum information processing devices. The work is reported recently in the journal, in a paper by MIT graduate students Hao Tang and Guoqing Wang and MIT professors Ju Li and Paola Cappellaro of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
“It’s very small, but it’s very intense,” he says of this force that holds the nuclei of atoms together. “But what’s interesting is we’ve got these many thousands of nuclei in this neutronic quantum dot, and that’s able to stabilize these bound states, which have much more diffuse wavefunctions at tens of nanometers . These neutronic bound states in a quantum dot are actually quite akin to Thomson’s plum pudding model of an atom, after his discovery of the electron.
“In conventional quantum dots, an electron is trapped by the electromagnetic potential created by a macroscopic number of atoms, thus its wavefunction extends to about 10 nanometers, much larger than a typical atomic radius,” says Cappellaro. “Similarly, in these nucleonic quantum dots, a single neutron can be trapped by a nanocrystal, with a size well beyond the range of the nuclear force, and display similar quantized energies.
Li notes that “artificial atoms” made up of assemblages of atoms that share properties and can behave in many ways like a single atom have been used to probe many properties of real atoms. Similarly, he says, these artificial molecules provide “an interesting model system” that might be used to study “interesting quantum mechanical problems that one can think about,” such as whether these neutronic molecules will have a shell structure that mimics the electron shell structure of atoms.
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