spooky action at a distance tagged posts

This artist’s impression of one of the most distant, oldest, brightest quasars ever seen is hidden behind dust. The quasar dates back to less than one billion years after the big bang.
Credit: NASA/ESA/G.Bacon, STScI

Results are among the strongest evidence yet for ‘spooky action at a distance’. New research boosts the case for quantum entanglement. Scientists have used distant quasars, one of which emitted its light 7.8 billion years ago and the other 12.2 billion years ago, to determine the measurements to be made on pairs of entangled photons. They found correlations among more than 30,000 pairs of photons – far exceeding the limit for a classically based mechanism.

Take, for instance, two particles sitting on opposite edges of the universe...

The shape and polarization of a conventional laser beam from a laser pointer mimics quantum entanglement when the laser beam has a polarization dependent shape. This can be used to encode twice as many bits of information as when the laser beam is “separable.” Credit: Giovanni Milione

In a classic eureka moment, a team of physicists is showing how beams from ordinary laser pointers mimic quantum entanglement with the potential of doubling the data speed of laser communication. Described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” when two quantum things are entangled, if one is ‘touched’ the other will ‘feel it,’ even if separated by a great distance.

“At the heart of quantum entanglement is ‘nonseparability’ — two entangled things are described by an unfactorizable equation,” sai...