Quantum Entanglement
- Anna Oliva
- Jan 16, 2023
- 1 min read
Quantum entanglement has become somewhat of a buzzword this past year for the breakthroughs and extensive media coverage it has received, and it's not hard to see why. The dependence of one particle's characteristics on those of another particle that can be billions of light years away holds fascinating implications for technology, as I described in a previous post on quantum computers. The complementary nature of entangled particles allows quantum information to travel faster than light from one particle to another. This connectedness can be further seen in their shared wave function, a quantity describing a particle’s wave characteristic.
How, then, do the particles become entangled? And how do they remain so even when very far apart? Simply put, two particles become entangled when they interact with one another. Because spin is conserved the combined spins of the two interacting particles must equal the original quantity of spin. Imagine this as an equation, with x for one particle, y for another, and an initial spin state of zero:
x + y = 0
If x is equal to one, then:
1 + y = 0
y = -1
This shows how one particle’s spin number impacts the other. Since the equation must always equal zero, no matter where the particles are, if one particle is altered the other changes correspondingly to maintain the same overall spin.
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to researchers who conducted experiments proving the correctness of quantum mechanics:
In Brookhaven National Laboratory, different types of particles were seen interacting for the first time:
A more in-depth explanation:
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