Wednesday 1 February 2012

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons, electrons, molecules as large as "buckyballs", and even small diamonds interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description (state), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc.

Source: Discovery
According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, their shared state is indefinite until measured. Quantum entanglement is a form of quantum superposition. When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin). Thus, there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances.

This behavior is consistent with quantum mechanical theory and has been demonstrated experimentally, and it is accepted by the physics community. However there is some debate about a possible underlying mechanism that enables this correlation to occur even when the separation distance is large. The difference in opinion derives from espousal of various interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Research into quantum entanglement was initiated by a paper of Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in 1935; the EPR paradox, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter.Although these first studies focused on the counterintuitive properties of entanglement, with the aim of criticizing quantum mechanics, eventually entanglement was verified experimentally, and recognized as a valid, fundamental feature of quantum mechanics; the focus of the research has now changed to its utilization as a resource for communication and computation.

Quantum systems can become entangled through various types of interactions (see section on methods below). If entangled, one object cannot be fully described without considering the other(s). They remain in a quantum superposition and share a single quantum state until a measurement is made.

An example of entanglement occurs when subatomic particles decay into other particles. These decay events obey the various conservation laws, and as a result, pairs of particles can be generated so that they are in some specific quantum states. For instance, a pair of these particles may be generated having a two-state spin: one must be spin up and the other must be spin down. This type of entangled pair, where the particles always have opposite spin, is known as the spin anti-correlated case, and if the probabilities for measuring each spin are equal, the pair is said to be in the singlet state.

If each of two hypothetical experimenters, Alice and Bob, has one of the particles that form an entangled pair, and Alice measures the spin of her particle, the measurement will be entirely unpredictable, with a 50% probability of the spin being up or down. But if Bob subsequently measures the spin of his particle, the measurement will be entirely predictable―always opposite to Alice's, hence perfectly anti-correlated.

So far in this example experiment, the correlation seen with aligned measurements (i.e., up and down only) can be simulated classically. To make an analogous experiment, a coin might be sliced along the circumference into two half-coins, in such a way that each half-coin is either "heads" or "tails", and each half-coin put in a separate envelope and distributed respectively to Alice and to Bob, randomly. If Alice then "measures" her half-coin, by opening her envelope, for her the measurement will be unpredictable, with a 50% probability of her half-coin being "heads" or "tails", and Bob's "measurement" of his half-coin will always be opposite, hence perfectly anti-correlated.

However, with quantum entanglement, if Alice and Bob measure the spin of their particles in directions other than just up or down, with the directions chosen to form a Bell's inequality, they can now observe a correlation that is fundamentally stronger than anything that is achievable in classical physics. Here, the classical simulation of the experiment breaks down because there are no "directions" other than heads or tails to be measured in the coins.

One might imagine that using a die instead of a coin could solve the problem, but the fundamental issue about measuring spin in different directions is that these measurements cannot have definite values at the same time―they are incompatible. In classical physics this does not make sense, since any number of properties can be measured simultaneously with arbitrary accuracy. Bell's theorem implies, and it has been proven mathematically, that compatible measurements cannot show Bell-like correlations, and thus entanglement is a fundamentally non-classical phenomenon.

Experimental results have demonstrated that effects due to entanglement travel at least thousands of times faster than the speed of light. In another experiment, the measurements of the entangled particles were made in moving, relativistic reference frames in which each respective measurement occurred before the other, and the measurement results remained correlated.

No comments:

Post a Comment