90-year-old quantum guitar strings mystery finally explained

Scientists have solved a nearly century-old problem in quantum physics by providing the first exact solution to the damped quantum harmonic oscillator—a quantum analog of a guitar string that gradually loses energy. Traditionally, physicists struggled to describe how quantum systems lose energy without violating Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which limits the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, can be known simultaneously. Previous models failed because they either broke this principle or could not accurately capture the damping process at the atomic scale. The breakthrough came by considering the atom not in isolation but as part of a many-body system interacting with all other atoms in its environment. Using a sophisticated mathematical technique called the multimode Bogoliubov transformation, the researchers revealed that the atom settles into a multimode squeezed vacuum state. This state carefully balances quantum uncertainties, reducing noise in one property while increasing it in another, thus preserving the uncertainty principle while accurately modeling energy loss. This solution opens new avenues for ultra-precise measurements beyond the