Complex numbers aren't stupid anymore..

For almost a century, physicists have been intrigued by the fundamental question: why are complex numbers so important in quantum mechanics, that is, numbers containing a component with the imaginary number i?

Usually, it was assumed that they are only a mathematical trick to facilitate the description of phenomena, and only results expressed in real numbers have a physical meaning.

However, a Polish-Chinese-Canadian team of researchers has proved that the imaginary part of quantum mechanics can be observed in action in the real world.

We need to significantly reconstruct our naive ideas about the ability of numbers to describe the physical world.

Until now, it seemed that only real numbers were related to measurable physical quantities.

However, research conducted by the team of Dr. Alexander Streltsov from the Centre for Quantum Optical Technologies (QOT) at the University of Warsaw with the participation of scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei and the University of Calgary, found quantum states of entangled photons that cannot be distinguished without resorting to complex numbers.

Moreover, the researchers also conducted an experiment confirming the importance of complex numbers for quantum mechanics.

Articles describing the theory and measurements have just appeared in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A.

Source: scitechdaily.com/physicists-prove-that-the-imaginary-part-of-quantum-mechanics-really-exists/