Faculty highlight: Senthil Todadri
Mother nature is like a restless child who fidgets even when at rest, because electrons are never completely at rest, even at the coldest temperatures, says Professor Senthil Todadri, a theoretician in the MIT Department of Physics. Imagine pushing a pendulum hanging from a clock. It will swing back and forth, but eventually it will come to a complete stop so that it has a velocity of zero, but we also can see that it has a definite position in space. In the quantum world of electrons, knowing both of these properties, velocity and position, with ultimate precision is forbidden by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. “Quantum mechanically, there is still some motion even in the default state, what we call the ground state,” Senthil says. (Although his legal name is Senthil Todadri, he publishes under the name T. Senthil.) “It’s unavoidable motion that’s there, even in the default state, the lowest...