Quantum-mechanical tunneling and cables
Entry posted by wgscott
I was poking around the USB cable thread and saw reference to this, so I went a hunting, and found the following claim:
By applying a two million volt signal to a cable at a specific pulse modulation, and ultra high frequency for an exact duration of time, we transform the entire cable at a molecular level through a phenomenon called Quantum Tunneling. This process is performed on all TESLA Series cables, from Galileo Basik Strings and Au 79 and Magnetic Tricon to Apex, and can be applied to models not Quantum Tunneled for an additional charge. The before and after is startling, with a lower noise floor and improvements in inner detail, air, low frequency extension, and overall transparency and signal speed.
http://www.synergisticresearch.com/tesla-series/tesla-series-technologies/
So, you might ask yourself, what is quantum-mechanical tunneling?
When I teach this (as I do, every year), I sometimes make reference to a more familiar phenomenon. If you take a laser beam, and point it at a glass prism, what you will find is that part of the beam is transmitted in the original direction, and part is split off, and reflected. If you change the angle of the prism relative to the incoming laser, there comes an angle, called the critical angle, beyond which all the light is reflected, and none is transmitted. It looks like this:
Now take a second prism, and place it next to the first one. If the two glass surfaces touch, suddenly you get the laser beam propagating out in the un-bent, transmission angle again.
That's the optical version of tunneling.
You can treat this classically, using something called an evanescent wave. You can also treat it quantum-mechanically, and it is again the same sort of wave phenomenon, except the wave now describes the probability of finding the particle in what we call a classically forbidden region. So it works exactly the same way for photons and electrons. The electron "tunnels" through a barrier despite not having enough energy to hop over it.
It doesn't change the molecular structure of anything. Not the glass. Not the wire. Nada.
These guys might be doing something else to "change the molecular structure" of the wire (which, by the way, isn't made of "molecules" in the first place, but rather an array of metal atoms). But it ain't quantum tunneling.
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