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Quantum Question


Maine farmer

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A good explanation of what it is in addition to a property is hard. The way I  see it is that the particle has some angular momentum and we call this spin. There is much more to it though.

 

I can reply better why it does matter:
Easy answer first: the magnet holding your TO-Do-list on the fridge. More in detail, iron is a Ferromagnet which means that if you apply a magnetic field to it after removing it it stays (as long as it is below its Curie Temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature, seeming to be at ~1k K...I always thought that one could test it at home by cooking a magnet). This property comes from the spin of the electorns, the electron like any spinning charged particle gets a magnetic dipole moment (read, as they say on wikipedia, "an electron is a tiny little magnet"). In Ferromagnets it "just" happens that all the moments align (NB: the "just" hides a lot of physics with stuff like fermion Pauli-exclusion principle etc...i.e the whole lot of quantum mechanics) creating a field that can be felt.

 

Cool stuff: the angular moment of neutrinos have their angular momentum (spin) antiparallell to their direction of movement, anti-neutrinos have them parllalel, i.e neutrinos have only left-handed chirality anti-neutrinos have only right-handed chirality; to my understanding it is not clear yet why this is so.
 

Very cool stuff of spin: I guess you heard of quantum entanglement? This thing where you can instantaneously affect a particle doing something to its partner entangled particle with instantaneously meaning instantaneously (but it does not break the law/axiom that it travels quicker than c, I can elaborate on that if you want). A way this is done is to partner to electrons to have opposite spins and if one is changed from up to down the other instantaneously changes from down to up; so if entangle two particles and then separate them physically they are still entangled and this spin swapping still happens not matter how far they are

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