Monday 4 January 2021

The quantum energy level shuffling experiment again

 Last May I had a short look at an old experiment from the Nuffield A Level Physics course that investigated quantum shuffling of particles on energy levels. More exciting things were happening and I didn't get far with it. We won't be going very far for a while so ....

The green squares are the particles and they all sit on energy level 1 at the start. Thus there are only 6 quanta of energy to share out. If one loses a quantum, another can gain. To choose randomly which, there are two dice. The blue decides which goes up and the green decides which goes down. Last time I had problems if the one to go down started in the ground state, level 0. This time I decided to rethrow both dice if such a forbidden move came up. It's proving tedious with a lot of rethrows. After 20 legal throws, here's what emerged.