All research posts

In this notebook, we’ll calculate nuclear fusion rates using the Gamow model. We’ll first focus our attention the spontaneous fusion of two deuterons in a $\rm D_2$ molecule and then explore what fusion rates we might expect when $\rm D_2$ is absorbed into metals like palladium where “electron screening” plays an important role.

Deuterium loading of metals is a critical parameter for determining rates of low energy nuclear reactions. In this notebook, we showcase a recent experiment involving deuterium loading of a titanium foil. We show the data and analysis used to infer the loading ratio from gas pressure and temperature data.

This is the ninth tutorial of the series. In the last tutorial we observed speed-ups in emission and excitation transfer rates as a result of the delocalisation of excitations across many two level systems. We understood these rate accelerations to be a result of the constructive interference of many quantum pathways.

This is the eighth tutorial of the series. Last time, we saw hints of being able to accelerate quantum processes like spontaneous emission and excitation transfer by “delocalising” excitations across many two level systems (TLS).

This is the seventh notebook in this series. Last time, we did a bit of a deep dive into excitation transfer between 2 two level level systems (TLS) and discovered that, for realistic systems, it’s likely to be such a slow process that we might never see it.

In this sixth tutorial of the series, we continue exploring non-radiative excitation transfer. This process can move energy from one TLS to another without the emission and absorption processes that one would normally consider essential. In this notebook we’ll build some intuition for excitation transfer by experimenting with different two level system parameters.

In this third tutorial of the series on quantum particles in “boxes”, we show how the rate of quantum tunnelling of a particle through a barrier can be enhanced by placing identical boxes next to each other. Instead of the slow exponential decay that we found in the last tutorial, we find that the probability to find the particle in either box rapidly oscillates.

In this second tutorial of the the series on quantum particles in “boxes”, we try to confine a stationary particle inside a square potential well only to find it gets out. The wave nature of quantum particles produces reflection and transmission behaviour that we are more familiar with in the world of classical waves.

We begin this tutorial series on quantum particles in “boxes” by building the computational tools needed to explore the motion of particles in various confining potentials.  We need to do this because we are using Observable inside the browser to make things interactive - there are no quantum libraries for the browser like there are for Python (see QuTiP).

Today, we are introducing a new tutorial series that explores the quantum behaviour of particles moving under the influence of a confining potential - aka a “quantum box” 📦. Why? When particles are free, they can have any energy they like but when they are confined their energy can only take on discrete values, aka energy levels which is one of the hallmarks of quantum physics. It is therefore important to develop an understanding of how confined quantum particles behave.