Scientists demonstrate quantum radar prototype

Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have invented a new radar prototype that uses quantum entanglement as a method of object detection. This successful integration of quantum mechanics into devices could significantly impact the biomedical and security industries. The research is published in the journal Science Advances. …

How growth of the scientific enterprise influenced a century of quantum physics

Austrian quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger first used the term “entanglement,” in 1935, to describe the mind-bending phenomenon in which the actions of two distant particles are bound up with each other. Entanglement was the kind of thing that could keep Schrödinger awake at night; like his friend Albert Einstein, he thought it cast doubt on quantum mechanics as a viable description…

Quantum entanglement offers unprecedented precision for GPS and more

Your phone’s GPS, the Wi-Fi in your house and communications on aircraft are all powered by radio-frequency, or RF, waves, which carry information from a transmitter at one point to a sensor at another. The sensors interpret this information in different ways. For example, a GPS sensor uses the angle at which it receives an RF wave to determine its own…

Quantum-entangled light from a vibrating membrane

Entanglement, a powerful form of correlation among quantum systems, is an important resource for quantum computing. Researchers from the Quantum Optomechanics group at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, recently entangled two laser beams through bouncing them off the same mechanical resonator, a tensioned membrane. This provides a novel way of entangling disparate electromagnetic fields, from microwave radiation to optical…

Is nonlocality inherent in all identical particles in the universe?

What is interaction, and when does it occur? Intuition suggests that the necessary condition for the interaction of independently created particles is their direct touch or contact through physical force carriers. In quantum mechanics, the result of the interaction is entanglement—the appearance of non-classical correlations in the system. It seems that quantum theory allows entanglement of independent particles without any contact….

One-kilometer breakthrough made in quantum field

A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and collaborators first realized distribution of high-dimensional orbital angular momentum entanglement over a 1 km few-mode fiber. The result is published in Optica. …

A better starting point for exploring entanglement

Quantum entanglement is perhaps one of the most intriguing phenomena known to physics. It describes how the fates of multiple particles can become entwined, even when separated by vast distances. Importantly, the probability distributions needed to define the quantum states of these particles deviate from the bell-shaped, or ‘Gaussian’ curves which underly many natural processes. Non-Gaussian curves don’t apply to quantum…

A spookily good sensor

Scientists from the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at The University of Tokyo demonstrated a method for coupling a magnetic sphere with a sensor via the strange power of quantum entanglement. They showed that the existence of even a single magnetic excitation in the sphere could be detected with a one-shot measurement. This work represents a major advancement…