The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.
At a quick glance, I did not see the term "collapsed" in wiki. It isn't a collapse. (The concept is still relevant[0]!)
What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.
Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)
[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..
"I didn't expect to understand this topic like with most articles about weird shit on Wikipedia but wow, that animation actually brought the DC of grokking that knowledge within the reach of my INT modifier! Like super cool, dude!"
How's this? Is it more human-like now?
(your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)
The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.
At a quick glance, I did not see the term "collapsed" in wiki. It isn't a collapse. (The concept is still relevant[0]!)
What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.
Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)
[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..
The animation is pretty good and helps to easily understand the phenomenon
And the music that goes along with it is pretty great, too.
Apparently done by this artist? https://laoexperiment.bandcamp.com/album/quantum-magnet-soun...
For real, not what I expect to come across when checking out more in-the-weeds topics. Super accessible, even for a layman like me.
Not a big fan of the music though, sounded like I left another video playing in the background at points.
this looks like those bot comments on youtube videos.
Maybe you're a bad judge of what comments are botted?
9 replies →
"I didn't expect to understand this topic like with most articles about weird shit on Wikipedia but wow, that animation actually brought the DC of grokking that knowledge within the reach of my INT modifier! Like super cool, dude!"
How's this? Is it more human-like now?
(your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)