Physicists break Newton's gravitational law

A team of physicists from the Universities of Innsbruck, Paris-Sud and Harvard and Technical University of Munich (TUM) have found a technique that violates Newton’s law.

The physicists discovered that a quantum particle which instead of moving uniformly, portrays an interesting oscillatory back-and-forth motion in one-dimensional atomic gas.

Per Sir Isaac Newton’s law regarding the apple falling from tree, the motion of objects subject to a force. It explains that a moving body will continue to move in a straight path until any disturbing force comes in its way.

Though the law is omnipresent in our everyday world, it’s not the same in the quantum world. In the journal Science, the team explained a particle that depicts an entirely odd behavior.

Rather than falling in a straight line like the apple, the particle oscillates. Science Daily reported, this astonishing behavior of the particles leads to the fact that the quantum mechanics permits the particles to show a similar behavior like waves that can cancel or add up one another, a reality that physicists call ‘quantum interference’.

In order to examine the particle’s movement, the team cooled a gas Cesium atoms almost above absolute zero temperature and then restricted it to an arrangement of really thin tubes containing high-power laser beams. The atoms were later made to interact strongly amongst one another.

Due to the extreme conditions, the atoms formed a quantum fluid with their movement confined to the tubes’ direction. Making use of gas, the team also accelerated another impurity atom (an atom in diverse spin state), which is equal to the apple falling from tree in our usual world.

However, the end result showed the quantum wave of the atom being dispersed by the other atoms and getting reflected again. In the realm of physics, the result proved to an outstanding oscillatory movement, proving that Newton’s law does not apply in the quantum world.

According to TUM, Michael Knap, professor at TUM stated, “Understanding the oddity of quantum mechanics is also relevant in a broader scope. It might help to understand and optimize fundamental processes in electronics components, or even transport processes in complex biological systems.”