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Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics

Getting all entangled up

01 May 2001

In 1936, in the same paper in which he introduced his famous cat, Erwin Schrödinger drew attention to a feature of quantum mechanics that he called entanglement. Since then entanglement – a connection between separated particles that Einstein described as “spooky” – has come to be seen as the source of much that is difficult to understand in quantum theory.

In the last decade, however, a more constructive aspect of entanglement has emerged, and it is now seen as a valuable resource that could provide significant improvements in our powers of communication and computing. Now Paul Kwiat and Salvado Barraza-Lopez of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and André Stefanov and Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, have shown experimentally that entanglement can be manipulated, controlled and even concentrated or “distilled” (P G Kwiat et al. 2001 Nature 409 1014).

In the May issue of Physics World, Tony Sudbery of the University of York, UK, explains what it all means.

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