Quantum entanglement in the real world: IOP Publishing’s 600th ebook

I remember sitting in a meeting here at IOP Publishing about a decade ago when the idea of an ebooks programme was first mooted by one of our directors. With so much in the publishing world switching from print to online, it struck me as a timely and sensible concept. After much hard work, the IOP Publishing ebooks programme was launched in 2013.

The programme has expanded since then, now featuring general-interest titles about burgeoning new fields, overviews of specialist topics that provide a route into the primary literature, as well as texts for students. There are also ebooks partnerships with the American Astronomical Society, the Biophysical Society and the Institute for Physics and Engineering in Medicine. You can even find a set of super-short Physics World Discovery ebooks.

Recently we’ve passed a milestone with the publication of the 600th IOP Publishing ebook. Entitled Quantum Entanglement Engineering and Applications, it’s been written by F J Duarte – a laser physicist based in Western New York, US – and Travis Taylor, who’s principal scientist at the Quantum Entanglement and Space Technologies Laboratory at the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Alabama.

In the video above, you can see Azahara Perez, IOP Publishing’s senior marketing executive for ebooks, talking to Duarte about his book. Often viewed as one of the strangest and most mysterious parts of physics, quantum entanglement refers to the fact that particles can be linked even if they are physically a long way apart.

Albert Einstein famously didn’t like the idea that the quantum state of one entangled particle in a pair can change instantly when a measurement is made on the other particle, dismissing it as “spooky” action at a distance. However, these days quantum entanglement has real-world applications in everything from fibre communications (both from Earth and via space) to quantum computing.

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And its emergence as a real-world technology is where Duarte and Taylor’s ebook comes in, by providing scientists and engineers with practical mathematical tools to handle entanglement and to design functioning optical systems.

The book is part of a wider IOP Series in Coherent Sources, Quantum Fundamentals, and Applications. If you have an idea for an ebook of your own, do get in touch via the IOP ebooks website.