Stanford researchers hear the sound of qua...(es quantum drums. Each drum has only 30 ...)

The result? Just as in the normal world, two nanostructures with different shapes can resonate in the same way, a phenomenon known as isospectrality. Manoharan, along with his graduate student Chris Moon and others, published their result in the Feb 8 edition of the journal Science. To reinforce the point, they created a video, complete with two quantum drums beating with the same sound. (The real "sound" is at ultra-high frequencies in the terahertz range; in the video, the sound has been converted to the range of human hearing.)

The practical value of having two different nanostructures with identical properties may lie in the design of ever-smaller computer chip circuits, Manoharan said. Designers of nano-electronic circuits will have two ways to get the same result. "Now your design palette is twice as big," he said.

While the chip industry attempts to shrink existing circuitry, Manoharan is literally coming from the opposite direction. "My research asks, what if you start at the bottom of the ladder? We assemble structures one atom at a time," he said. The unexplored gap between bottom-up research and the industry's shrink-down effort "is where the excitement is," he said.

The work has a natural connection to the problems of quantum computing, he said.

The research may also have connections to string theory, used by cosmologists attempting to understand the structure of the universe, Manoharan said: "There is somehow embedded into the topology of our universe this bizarre spectral ambiguity." String theories describe complex surfaces that are higher-dimensional analogues of these two-dimensional quantum drums.

The drum research has another finding important to the world of quantum mechanics. While it is impossible to directly observe the quantum phase of the wave functions of the electr
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