Vacuum

For other uses, see vacuum cleaner and Vacuum (musical group).

The quantum-mechanical vacuum

Even an ideal vacuum, thought of as the complete absence of anything, will not in practice remain empty. One reason is that the walls of a vacuum chamber emit light in the form of black-body radiation: visible light if they are at a temperature of thousands of degrees, infrared light if they are cooler. If this soup of photons is in thermodynamic equilibrium with the walls, it can be said to have a particular temperature, as well as a pressure.

Related Topics:
Black-body radiation - Thermodynamic equilibrium

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More fundamentally, quantum mechanics predicts that vacuum energy can never be exactly zero. The lowest possible energy state is called the zero-point energy and consists of a seething mass of virtual particles that have brief existence. This is called vacuum fluctuation. While most agree that this represents a significant part of particle physics, it is a concept that would benefit from a deeper understanding than currently available. Vacuum fluctuations may also be related to the so-called cosmological constant in the theory of gravitation, if indeed this entity were to be observed in nature on a macroscopic scale. The best support for vacuum fluctuations is the Casimir effect.

Related Topics:
Quantum mechanics - Vacuum energy - Zero-point energy - Virtual particle - Vacuum fluctuation - Particle physics - Cosmological constant - Theory of gravitation - Casimir effect

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In quantum field theory and string theory, the term "vacuum" is used to represent the ground state in the Hilbert space, that is, the state with the lowest possible energy. In free (non-interacting) quantum field theories, this state is analogous to the ground state of a quantum harmonic oscillator. If the theory is obtained by quantization of a classical theory, each stationary point of the energy in the configuration space gives rise to a single vacuum. String theory is believed to be analogous to quantum field theory but one with a huge number of vacua - with the so-called anthropic landscape.

Related Topics:
Quantum field theory - String theory - Ground state - Hilbert space - Quantum harmonic oscillator - Stationary point - Configuration space - Anthropic landscape

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