This publication is essentially a compilation of the lecture notes taken by several people at the introductory course in quantum mechanics given by the authors in conjunction with Los Alamos ...

One hundred years ago on a quiet, rocky island, German physicist Werner Heisenberg helped set in motion a series of scientific developments that would touch nearly all of physics. There, Heisenberg ...

Quantum theory is often sold as a story about tiny particles, but its real disruption lands squarely on our everyday sense of what is real. At the smallest scales, the equations that power lasers, ...

A century ago, science went quantum. To celebrate, physicists are throwing a global, year-long party. In 1925, quantum mechanics, the scientific theory that describes the unintuitive rules of physics ...

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the ...

Dark matter is an elusive form of matter that almost never emits, absorbs or reflects light, while only weakly interacting with regular matter. These properties make it very difficult to detect using ...

But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful ...

Physicists are rethinking one of quantum mechanics’ biggest puzzles: how fuzzy possibilities become definite reality. New research suggests that spontaneous “collapse” processes—possibly linked to ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly ...