Explainer: What is quantum tunnelling?
Welcome to a weird world where reactions that ought to be impossible occur regularly
At the smallest scale, the world is weird. When things get down to the size of an atom, the mechanics that rule our macroscopic world no longer apply.
According to quantum rules, electrons can behave both as a particle and wave, and objects can be in different states at once – a phenomenon quantum computers use to their advantage. One of the strangest things scientists discovered when picking apart quantum mathematics is tunnelling.