Hello, I Hope you all are fine and I welcome you to my blog once again and thanks for the constant encouragement.

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Before I go into what I have for today, I know many of us that have been browsing round the tag #steemSTEM and have been seeing topics on Quantum and don't have I an idea or the basics of what is it about including me until I decided to research, and i got encouragement from one of the #stemng members sir Green.

In this article we would see the basics and more as the spirit leads because I don't want to be selfish about this knowledge.

Introduction

Lets start from some terminologies and their meaning so we would not get lost as we go on with the ride.

What is Quantum Mechanics:

People mostly interchange quantum mechanics with quantum physics but mind you, mechanics is a branch of physics and quantum mechanics does not mean only mechanics, it is also used for the new principles that talks about mostly all quantum theories even if they could or could not be interpreted as mechanics just like field theory.

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particles.¦Source

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Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of subatomic particles at the nano size. It is one of the most successful branches of physics and there are plenty of examples of scientific experiments concerning predictions made by the laws of quantum mechanics.

What is a Particle:

A particle is a small localized object to which can be ascribed several physical or chemical properties such as volume, density or mass, they vary greatly in size or quantity, from subatomic particles like the electron, to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like powders and other granular materials.¦Source

We are all familiar with electron, nucleous which is made up of other particles which are the protons and neutrons. The electron is an elementary particle which is also a fundamental constituent of the universe. Protons and neutrons are made up of other particles called quark, this quark is also elementary particles and they are held together by gluon, gluon is also a particle but different from the quark, they are the particles that produce the strong force that holds the quarks together and it also behind the strong force that holds the protons and neutrons together within the nuclei of the atom.

_{image credit: link CC 3.0 Licensed}

Gluon does it by mediating the strong force between quark or between the protons and the neutron as the case may be.
Types of particles like electrons and quarks, it can be said to as creating matter and the type of particle while gluon can be said to as creating the forces.

Lets see the forces, there are four of them in number.

• Electromagnetic Force
• Gravity
• Weak force
• Strong force

Standard Model of Elementary Particles

This describes how all the elementary forces and particles in the universe behave except gravity which is a mystery.

There is matter particles or Fermions which is divided into quarks and leprosy.

There are six types of quarks which are up, down, bottom, top, charm and strange. And also the are six leptons which are electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau and tau neutrino.

There is also the force carrier particles also known as gauge bosons which are the gluon which I have explained above, the photons which are particles of light and it carries the electronic magnetic force that holds the electron in atoms and finally the W and Z bosons which carry the weak nuclear force which is involved in some forms of radioactivity. There is also another boson call the the Higgs boson discovered in 2012, this particular particle has something spectacular. Quite an uncountable number of Higgs boson makes up a Higgs field and it is the interaction with this field that give other particles their mass, take an example when the top quark is interacting with the Higgs field and it is what is giving the top quarks it mass.
Finally the last boson is the graviton, graviton is an hypothetical particle that mediates the gravitational force.

Lets see Quantum Leap

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At the subatomic level, energy can only be released and absorbed in discrete indivisible units called quanta which means electrons have fixed orbit around the nucleus of the atom as the energy comes in descent amount, when the electron gets excites or otherwise, they will absorbed or give off a specific quanta of energy which means they leap from one orbit to another without inhabiting the space in between, this process is the quantum leap. There is possibility that the electron can be in some places and not in some places within the atom as the energy is absorbed and released.

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Do you know particles behave like waves?

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This can be explained with a well know experiment called the Double slit experiment.

In modern physics, the double-slit experiment is a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; moreover, it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena. The original experiment was performed by Davisson and Germer in 1927.¦Source

In the process of the original experiment performed by Davisson and Germer, there is a gun that shoots tennis balls one by one at a detector and the detector would register where the tennis ball landed on the detector, in between the gun and the indicator there would be a barrier with 2 slits and it leaves openings for any of the tennis balls to go through. Over a period of time of shooting he tennis balls and after enough tennis balls are creating images on the detector which indicates where the tennis ball have landed, the result of the experiment will show that the ball that have not been blocked by the barrier landed directly behind the slits on the barrier.

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Let's use the real terms and relate it to the tennis experiment where we would use electrons instead of tennis balls.

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_{image credit: link CC 3.0 Licensed}

Thesame process like I explained up but now the balls are represented with electrons, as the guns shoot the electrons towards the detector through the barrier, the parting that emerged on the detector looks like what is on the image above. Which is the electrons landed not just above the slits but in narrow strips across the detector and most of the electrons would land on the middle of the barrier.

The pattern that merged in interference pattern as well as associated with the behavior of waves. Taking for instance we have two waves, the peak of the wave would combine to form a higher peak and the trough would formation deeper trough and when both meet they remove each other. Now let's imagine our electrons are not tennis ball and we see them as waves.

Going back to the process of the shooting of the ball, see it as waves that are going through the barrier and as they are moving see them as waves which from my explanation of moving waves where by the peaks meet to create higher peaks and the trough meet also to create a deeper trough and at a point the peak and through meet and there they cancel each other. This interaction between the tennis balls which we are imagining as a wave now results to the interference pattern the image above shows and like I explained where most of the electrons landed in the middle of the barrier because the waves is more intense in the middle so more of the waves (tennis balls) are located in the middle of the indicator and where the waves cancel out it does not indicate on the indicator.

With Schrodinger equation

_{Image and gif: Same source link CC 3.0 Licensed}

This equation can be used to find the probability of the electron being in a particular location. Imagine the wave to be a load of probabilities and the size of the wave in any location predicts the likely hood that the electron would be found there if it is looked for that is why on the indicator there would be most of the electrons landed on the middle of indicator where the electron wave is at its most intense which seams if the electron is not in a phase position but have the probability of being in many different places at ones.

This behavior can be measured and also there is a principle behind this measurement called the superposition principle, maybe next time we would pick up from there so to avoid too lengthy content you may get tired of we would stop here. I hope I passed the knowledge

_{I never knew the topic is this interested until I picked up the courage to study and I kept openning tabs and tabs on my browser.}

References for more information

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Ref 1|Ref 2|Ref 3|Ref 4|Ref 5|Ref 6|Ref 7|Ref 8|Ref 9|Ref 10|Ref 11

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Thanks for your time
@osariemen