edgepedia

Physical world and mathematics

42,772 articles

Quantum electrodynamics

Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the quantum field theory describing how charged particles interact with light through photon exchange; it earned Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman the 1965 Nobel Prize.

Quantum emitter

A quantum emitter is a nanoscale light source, such as an atom, molecule, defect, or quantum dot, that releases one photon at a time on demand.

Quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride

Quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) are atomic-scale defects in the layered semiconductor hBN that emit single photons one at a time, many stably at room temperature.

Quantum emitters in transition metal dichalcogenides

Quantum emitters in transition metal dichalcogenides are defect-like sites in atomically thin semiconductors such as WSe₂ that emit single photons on demand, first demonstrated in monolayer WSe₂ in 2015.

Quantum emitters in two-dimensional materials

Quantum emitters in two-dimensional materials are localized defects in atomically thin crystals that emit light one photon at a time, first identified in monolayer WSe2 by five research teams in 2015.

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement is a property of composite quantum systems whose parts cannot be described independently, showing correlations stronger than classical physics allows; it earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Quantum eraser experiment

The quantum eraser experiment, also called quantum erasure, is an interferometry experiment in which which-path information is erased so interference reappears, proposed by Scully and Drühl in 1982.

Quantum error correction with GKP bosonic qubits

Quantum error correction with GKP bosonic qubits encodes a logical qubit in one oscillator's grid states, per the 2001 Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill code, correcting small displacement errors.

Quantum error detection

Quantum error detection is a cheaper alternative to full quantum error correction that flags errors without fixing them, discarding failed runs; it works only where post-selection is available.

Quantum error mitigation

Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is a set of methods that reduce noise in quantum computers by classically post-processing noisy measurements, used on near-term NISQ devices lacking error correction resources.

Quantum ESPRESSO

Quantum ESPRESSO, whose core package is PWscf, is an open-source suite of codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, plane waves, and pseudopotentials.

Quantum extremal surface

A quantum extremal surface is a codimension-two surface in a gravitational spacetime at which the generalized entropy is stationary, introduced by Netta Engelhardt and Aron C. Wall in 2014.

Quantum feedback

Quantum feedback is the control of a quantum system using a measurement record or engineered coherent feedback, with measurement back-action included, enabling qubit stabilization and error correction.

Quantum field theory

Quantum field theory (QFT) is the framework describing particles as excitations of fields defined at every point of spacetime, and the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Quantum field theory in curved spacetime

Quantum field theory in curved spacetime (QFTCS) studies quantum fields on a fixed classical curved geometry, explaining Hawking radiation and the Unruh effect in black holes and the early universe.

Quantum finite automaton

A quantum finite automaton, also called a quantum finite state machine, is a theoretical computation model whose state is a quantum superposition, introduced in 1997.

Quantum Fisher information

Quantum Fisher information (QFI) is a quantity in quantum estimation theory that measures how much information a quantum state carries about an unknown parameter, such as a phase or magnetic field.

Quantum Fisher information as an entanglement witness

Quantum Fisher information as an entanglement witness is a diagnostic in which the quantum Fisher information, a quantity from quantum metrology, certifies multipartite entanglement in quantum many-body systems.

Quantum Flagship

The Quantum Flagship, launched by the EU in 2018 after the 2016 Quantum Manifesto, is a €1 billion, 10-year initiative funding quantum computing, communication, simulation, and sensing research.

Quantum fluctuation

A quantum fluctuation, also called a vacuum fluctuation, is the random variation in a physical quantity that arises from quantum mechanics even in a system's lowest-energy state.

Quantum foam

Quantum foam, also called spacetime foam, is the hypothesized picture of spacetime at very small scales, where quantum fluctuations make geometry vary wildly like a froth of bubbles.

Quantum formal languages and grammars

Quantum formal languages are sets of strings described by quantum devices with amplitude-weighted rules; quantum context-free languages strictly extend classical context-free languages, and bounded-error one-way quantum automata recognize only some regular languages.

Quantum foundations

Quantum foundations is the research field asking what quantum theory says about reality, centered on the measurement problem and including hidden variables, collapse theories, and many-worlds.

Quantum frequency conversion

Quantum frequency conversion shifts single photons from one optical frequency to another while preserving their quantum state, letting quantum memories interface with low-loss telecom fiber networks.

Quantum friction

Quantum friction, also called Casimir friction or vacuum friction, is a predicted contactless drag force between bodies in relative motion, mediated by quantum electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations.

Quantum gas microscope

A quantum gas microscope is an apparatus that images ultracold atoms in an optical lattice with single-atom, single-site resolution, first built at Harvard University and reported in 2009.

Quantum gate teleportation

Quantum gate teleportation is a quantum computing technique that applies a gate by teleporting data through an entangled resource state, proposed by Gottesman and Chuang in 1999.

Quantum generative adversarial network

A quantum generative adversarial network (QGAN, also QuGAN) is a generative adversarial network with quantum components, introduced by Seth Lloyd and Christian Weedbrook in 2018.

Quantum geometry in loop quantum gravity

Quantum geometry in loop quantum gravity is the body of results showing that area and volume operators have discrete spectra, so Planck-scale space is built from quanta.

Quantum graph

A quantum graph is a graph whose edges are one-dimensional intervals carrying a self-adjoint differential operator, combining graph theory with spectral theory to model waves in mesoscale systems.