A Filipino mathematician from the University of the Philippines (UP) has helped make a big idea in quantum science easier to understand.
Dr. Arvin Lamando from the UP Diliman College of Science, together with Dr. Henry McNulty from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, created a new way to describe how “operators” — special mathematical tools — work.
These operators are important in fields like quantum mechanics and signal processing, which deal with how tiny particles behave and how data or sounds are analyzed.
According to Dr. Lamando, their work is part of a branch of math called harmonic analysis. This type of math studies how complicated signals, like sounds or waves, can be broken into smaller, simpler parts.
“It’s like taking a musical chord and figuring out the individual notes that make it up,” he explained.
Once the parts are known, they can be combined again to recreate the original sound — or in math terms, the original signal.
Dr. Lamando and Dr. McNulty applied these same ideas to the world of quantum physics, where instead of signals, they studied operators.
They found that even the most complex operators can be broken down into simpler ones and then rebuilt, just like musical notes forming a chord.
Their study also introduced a new concept called modulation of an operator, which helps describe how these mathematical objects change when shifted or adjusted.
To do this, they used a framework called the Heisenberg module — named after Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
The two scientists discovered that these special operators behave in predictable ways, and that their complex structures can be closely copied using simpler, easier-to-understand versions. This makes it easier for scientists to connect pure math with the real behavior of quantum systems.
Their research, titled “On Modulation and Translation Invariant Operators and the Heisenberg Module,” was published in the Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications, a respected international math journal.
