In a Major Breakthrough, Physicists Directly Image The Quantum Fluctuations of Empty Space

Add ScienceAlert on Google Even 'empty' space is seething with quantum fluctuations. (Quardia/iStock/Getty Images Plus) Empty space is never actually truly empty.

Even a quantum field in its lowest-energy state, the vacuum, has unavoidable fluctuations that arise from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: Certain pairs of properties cannot both have precisely defined values at the same time.

In real-world terms, this means that a quantum field should resemble a staticky TV, and plenty of indirect evidence suggests this is the case.

Now, however, physicists led by Yansheng Zhang at the University of Cambridge in the UK have made a major breakthrough: They have directly imaged fluctuations in a lab-made quantum field.

"Observing such fluctuations in the sine-Gordon limit opens many possibilities for laboratory simulations of relativistic fields in regimes that are presently not theoretically tractable," they write in a preprint posted to arXiv .