This argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One particle arriving can signal information that some event has occurred at the source. Re: structure/complexity I imagine you could use different elements (and maybe spin too?) to form several bits.
This argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One particle arriving can signal information that some event has occurred at the source. Re: structure/complexity I imagine you could use different elements (and maybe spin too?) to form several bits.
Looking at the paper being discussed here - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/abb515/... - the authors also don't seem to have an explanation.
One final caveat worth noting is that our results do not definitively prove that an ensemble of free particles will always be a preferable method of transmitting a signal to an ensemble of tunneled particles. It is our intention to include a discussion of this in a follow-up paper.
This is basically the scenario you're talking about, forming several bits out of different particles and using them in conjunction to send information faster than light. The researchers aren't sure why this wouldn't happen in their model.
Any form of FTL causes problems with causality - or at least with current assumptions about causality. So physicists tend to work back from that to "Therefore this is impossible."
But those assumptions may turn out to be wrong and relativity may be violated in specific quantum contexts. And then all kinds of interesting things happen.
Incidentally, this is an example of the kind of thing Hossenfelder was talking about. You could spend $20bn on a new collider, or you can spend a couple of million - at the absolute most - to check there's nothing unexpected happening here.
It's a wild bet, but given the up side it's hard to characterise it as poor value.
At worst you'll get some insight into the interface between QM and relativity, with another situation where Relativity Wins Again - but you understand why, in detail.
At best you'll get something more challenging and interesting.
Just out of interest, I use the extremely fast switching times of tunnel diodes to make quick determinations of oscilloscope rise-times. When used as a switch their rise-times are much faster than most oscilloscopes so the rise-time seen on the oscilloscope is actually that of the scope itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-gate_MOSFET
Tunnel junctions are used in applications such as photovoltaics as well as high frequency circuits e.g. tunneling diodes.
Edit: Just to fix a confusion, by 'reliable' I meant, one electron sent, one received. I know one 'bit' isn't typically sent as one electron, but being reductive for comparison's sake. Obviously with enough current you can make the tunnel happen, but you'd need far more electrons and 'time' to do so.
The reason we don't often use tunneling diodes today in most devices is that they are expensive to make compared to many other modern diodes, they are still used in more unique applications including very sensitive scientific equipment and space applications.
In general there many types of semiconductors that employ a Quantum Well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_well this means that these SCs do RELIABLY utilize quantum tunneling by either inducing it under very specific conditions, or averting it.
I'm really not sure what you are skeptical about, without use being able to utilize QT reliably we wouldn't be able to make modern semi-conductors they would either not work because we can't make tunneling happen when we need it too, or won't work because we randomly induce it to happen.
It doesn't mean we fully "understand" Quantum Tunneling as in understand exactly why it happens, but we know enough to predict and control it, Quantum Tunneling is to the SC industry what fire was to humanity in general for milenia. We still probably can only roughly model the physics of fire, especially since at the end it's governed by QM effects, but we don't need that in fact we don't even need to understand combustion that well to utilize it.
But if you want single electron tunneling then yes it's possible there have been papers about it for a few decades with the latest ones also including some experimental work https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.5539.pdf
Single electron transistors are also being actively worked on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-electron_transistor
Sounds awesome. And thanks for the explanation.
If you send some some particles every time event occurs and occasionally they are received, even a single detection now gives the receiver information: that event occurred.
If the particles were sent FTL, you can now setup the standard causality paradoxes.
In this case in particular, if you receive no particles you know that the event either did not happen _or_ it did happen and you failed to detect the particle. If you do receive a particle you know that either the event happened at least once _or_ it did not happen and you have a false positive from your detector _or_ there was a particle but it was introduced by quantum noise. To make sure what actually happened you would need more signal, more particles per transmitted bit.
However, it is entirely possible that this reduction in effective bit rate will slow down actual bit rates back down to "normal" subluminal speeds.
(Where, the bit rate, bits/second, would, I think, be a measure of bandwidth. I could be wrong.)