This question has a fairly straight forward answer.
Where is the mass when an electron is just hanging about chilling?
It is spread out along it's wave function.
And the same thing is true when it tunnels through something.
The mass is spread along the electrons wave function.
Just keep thinking about the electron as a wave and not a particle here and it is easier to see how it works.
(Small disclaimer that I am just a layman but I try to be humble about that and I still feel sure about this.)
Possibly but there is a possibility information is energy and thus mass. In addition there are N dimensions in Hilbert space so information might transmit through N channels as with spread spectrum communication.
That is very interesting. I do believe that information underpins the universe. And also "negative entropy" as I call it. However, there could also be a very low level duality, like between entropy and enthalpy, as in thermodynamics, that resists unifiying. It could be that mass stems from the enthalpy side. I hope there's a could be around that for teleportation, to my human mind it seems like information and matter (maybe defined by mass) are two different primordial things. One is like the blueprint, and the other is like the material.. very anthropomorphic I know, but just seems to make sense to me.
I’m no particle physicist, but I would assume the pauli exclusion principle would prevent the electron from being in the same place as other electrons. If the electron ended up in a nucleus, it might undergo electron capture, converting a proton to a neutron (this seems highly unlikely though since the nucleus takes up such a small amount of space in an atom). As for nuclei, something like neutron degeneracy pressure probably prevents them from being in the same place as other nuclei.
>What happens to the mass of an electron when it tunnels through an object?
That's just a pop concept. Electrons don't routinely tunnel through *objects* as we usually speak, but instead through potential barriers generally somewhere from a pico- to a few nanometers in length. So it's not like, wow, the electron tunneled through a toaster.
Tunneling is described by the Schrödinger equation, and nothing special happens to mass in a tunneling event. IOW, it is fully described throughout the process and has the meaning it always does in the Schrödinger formalism.
Yes, it looks like even the stopwatch timing of tunneling experiments have the rubenium atom moving through an energy barrier of a laser beam: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2020-07-quantum-tunneling.amp. thanks for the reminder.. even the tunneling microscope is just through an energy barrier. It's easy to forget the formal definition of words like tunneling, when the colloquial meanings are so different outside of certain science domains.
I suppose the ammonia example is similar, as well as electron quantum leaps. And yes, I see articles saying tunneling through "walls" is misleading. So I suppose the wave/particle view holds by having the mass somehow spread out along the wave. And when the superposition collapses, the center of mass has moved. So, it must be that mass on small scales has to be viewed relativistically, as mentioned, as a ripple in the interaction with the Higgs field. So basically all matter is really energy in a wave at its smallest level.
There is a good ST episode about a theory that as objects increase in size, the individual particles cause the larger object's wave to collapse more frequently, until we have what we recognize as solid matter. But yeah, it seems like it's all waves and fields not turtles as you go down.
The ammonia example is interesting to think about, because a whole atom moves to the other side of the molecule, presumably "through" the central nitrogen atom.
Yes, it turns out its the hydrogens that flip like an umbrella.. so not passing through a central atom: https://news.mit.edu/2019/spooky-quantum-tunneling-1104
This question has a fairly straight forward answer. Where is the mass when an electron is just hanging about chilling? It is spread out along it's wave function. And the same thing is true when it tunnels through something. The mass is spread along the electrons wave function. Just keep thinking about the electron as a wave and not a particle here and it is easier to see how it works. (Small disclaimer that I am just a layman but I try to be humble about that and I still feel sure about this.)
Another layman here, since collapse is instantaneous the electron mass cannot directly participate. So tunneling is a form of teleportation.
Unfortunately, quantum teleportation is just for information. I think that's a limitation.
Possibly but there is a possibility information is energy and thus mass. In addition there are N dimensions in Hilbert space so information might transmit through N channels as with spread spectrum communication.
That is very interesting. I do believe that information underpins the universe. And also "negative entropy" as I call it. However, there could also be a very low level duality, like between entropy and enthalpy, as in thermodynamics, that resists unifiying. It could be that mass stems from the enthalpy side. I hope there's a could be around that for teleportation, to my human mind it seems like information and matter (maybe defined by mass) are two different primordial things. One is like the blueprint, and the other is like the material.. very anthropomorphic I know, but just seems to make sense to me.
I’m no particle physicist, but I would assume the pauli exclusion principle would prevent the electron from being in the same place as other electrons. If the electron ended up in a nucleus, it might undergo electron capture, converting a proton to a neutron (this seems highly unlikely though since the nucleus takes up such a small amount of space in an atom). As for nuclei, something like neutron degeneracy pressure probably prevents them from being in the same place as other nuclei.
>What happens to the mass of an electron when it tunnels through an object? That's just a pop concept. Electrons don't routinely tunnel through *objects* as we usually speak, but instead through potential barriers generally somewhere from a pico- to a few nanometers in length. So it's not like, wow, the electron tunneled through a toaster. Tunneling is described by the Schrödinger equation, and nothing special happens to mass in a tunneling event. IOW, it is fully described throughout the process and has the meaning it always does in the Schrödinger formalism.
Yes, it looks like even the stopwatch timing of tunneling experiments have the rubenium atom moving through an energy barrier of a laser beam: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2020-07-quantum-tunneling.amp. thanks for the reminder.. even the tunneling microscope is just through an energy barrier. It's easy to forget the formal definition of words like tunneling, when the colloquial meanings are so different outside of certain science domains. I suppose the ammonia example is similar, as well as electron quantum leaps. And yes, I see articles saying tunneling through "walls" is misleading. So I suppose the wave/particle view holds by having the mass somehow spread out along the wave. And when the superposition collapses, the center of mass has moved. So, it must be that mass on small scales has to be viewed relativistically, as mentioned, as a ripple in the interaction with the Higgs field. So basically all matter is really energy in a wave at its smallest level. There is a good ST episode about a theory that as objects increase in size, the individual particles cause the larger object's wave to collapse more frequently, until we have what we recognize as solid matter. But yeah, it seems like it's all waves and fields not turtles as you go down. The ammonia example is interesting to think about, because a whole atom moves to the other side of the molecule, presumably "through" the central nitrogen atom.
Yes, it turns out its the hydrogens that flip like an umbrella.. so not passing through a central atom: https://news.mit.edu/2019/spooky-quantum-tunneling-1104