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There's probably a serious error in the cover image caption, or the image itself is seriously misleading. I'm quoting verbatim: > "This composite image contain

There's probably a serious error in the cover image caption, or the image itself is seriously misleading. I'm quoting verbatim: > "This composite image contains an equation in the foreground related to theory research in high-temperature superconductivity, and images in the background resulting from high-temperature superconductivity experiments. Credit: Image courtesy of Penn State University" At least one of the images in the background is not 'resulting from high-temperature superconductivity experiments', it's just a plain rendering of the default preset of a Filter Forge filter 'Electricity': https://www.filterforge.com/filters/237.html https://www.filterforge.com/filters/237.html (I am the author of this particular filter, and the founder of Filter Forge. The 'electric' image looks a bit different on our page because we force seamless tiling to on when rendering images for the web).

snowwrestler 10y ago
It saddens me that the top comment is a technical note about the eye-catcher image, not the substance of the article.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The article doesn't have a lot of substance though. It spends a lot of time on what the goals are and buries the few snippets of what they actually did and measured. They have a physical simulator and a computational simulator? Maybe? It's a mess.
  - drostie 10y ago
    Yeah, basically. From what I can tell given some work I've done in a related field, what's happened is that they found a new way to do the math in a theoretical model some long time ago, and it revealed some cool new predictions within a certain temperature range, as well as some equivalent of high-T superconductivity at some other temperature range. Now they went to test it, which they did by supercooling potassium atoms while using lasers to force them into one place. (Conveniently you can also use lasers for refrigeration though I'm not sure if they did.) Then they switched the lasers to describe a big 2D standing wave which the potassium atoms spread out into, forming a square grid. These are called "optical lattices"; they're difficult to work with because you don't have anything small enough to really poke at individual atoms and even if you did you'd have to deal with how the lasers are blasting your poker left and right... so, you just have to kind of throw your hands up, "I am not going to care about any of these individual atoms." However, you get some nice bulk properties: for an easy example, if you just turn off the lasers and let stuff drift and then image it, they all basically started from the same place and drifted according to their velocity which is proportional to their momentum, so you can get an image of |ψ[p]|², the momentum-space distribution of the wavefunctions of the individual atoms. So that's cool. But basically you have this tiny little dot of well-arranged well-controlled particles, but you can only do bulk operations on them (including e.g. bulk entanglements by bringing pairs of rows closer together by messing with the lattice and cool stuff like that). While I'm not clear what the theoretical predictions were, exactly, apparently when they pushed the system into the first temperature regime described above they discovered whatever their theoretical model predicted. Hooray! This has given them some small confidence that maybe their theoretical model is a plausible step forward for understanding high-T superconductivity.
guelo 10y ago
I don't see any error, the image does contain images in the background from the experiments.

snowwrestler 10y ago

It saddens me that the top comment is a technical note about the eye-catcher image, not the substance of the article.

Dylan16807 10y ago
The article doesn't have a lot of substance though. It spends a lot of time on what the goals are and buries the few snippets of what they actually did and measured. They have a physical simulator and a computational simulator? Maybe? It's a mess.
- drostie 10y ago
  Yeah, basically. From what I can tell given some work I've done in a related field, what's happened is that they found a new way to do the math in a theoretical model some long time ago, and it revealed some cool new predictions within a certain temperature range, as well as some equivalent of high-T superconductivity at some other temperature range. Now they went to test it, which they did by supercooling potassium atoms while using lasers to force them into one place. (Conveniently you can also use lasers for refrigeration though I'm not sure if they did.) Then they switched the lasers to describe a big 2D standing wave which the potassium atoms spread out into, forming a square grid. These are called "optical lattices"; they're difficult to work with because you don't have anything small enough to really poke at individual atoms and even if you did you'd have to deal with how the lasers are blasting your poker left and right... so, you just have to kind of throw your hands up, "I am not going to care about any of these individual atoms." However, you get some nice bulk properties: for an easy example, if you just turn off the lasers and let stuff drift and then image it, they all basically started from the same place and drifted according to their velocity which is proportional to their momentum, so you can get an image of |ψ[p]|², the momentum-space distribution of the wavefunctions of the individual atoms. So that's cool. But basically you have this tiny little dot of well-arranged well-controlled particles, but you can only do bulk operations on them (including e.g. bulk entanglements by bringing pairs of rows closer together by messing with the lattice and cool stuff like that). While I'm not clear what the theoretical predictions were, exactly, apparently when they pushed the system into the first temperature regime described above they discovered whatever their theoretical model predicted. Hooray! This has given them some small confidence that maybe their theoretical model is a plausible step forward for understanding high-T superconductivity.

guelo 10y ago

I don't see any error, the image does contain images in the background from the experiments.