Three Electrons Entangled

An anonymous reader writes "Science Blog reports on Michigan researchers who have managed to entangle three electrons at once. "The quantum entanglement of three electrons, using an ultrafast optical pulse and a quantum well of a magnetic semiconductor material, has been demonstrated in a laboratory at the University of Michigan, marking another step toward the realization of a practical quantum computer. While several experiments in recent years have succeeded in entangling pairs of particles, few researchers have managed to correlate three or more particles in a predictable fashion.""

Comments

Ashcrorgy

[orangesquid]

Wow! A real orgy! Now which States, exactly, is this legal in?

I'm all for electron entanglement, as long as Ashcroft doesn't decide it's drug paraphernalia. I mean, after all, if one of those electrons was ever part of 9,1-tetrahydracannabinol (did I get that right?)...

Re:Ashcrorgy

[iggymanz]

3 way entanglement is also a problem if any of the electrons is less than 18 years old or more than two years younger than any of the others in the case of more than one being less than 18 years old

Algorithms?

[astroboscope]

Can anyone outline some algorithms that use 3 way entanglement?

Re:Algorithms?

[diggitzz]

A 3-D Shor's Algorithm, perhaps?

Qubits

[Ichijo]

I remember a Bill Cosby skit about this subject. It went something like this:

God: "I want you to build a quark."
Noah: "Right... what's a quark?"
God: " Make it 300 qubits by 80 qubits by 40 qubits."
Noah: "Right... what's a qubit?"

The true Qsort

[onallama]

permute_array(array);
if (is_sorted(array))
return array;
else
destroy_universe();

One electron says to the bartender ...

[diggitzz]

"I'm feeling a bit down today."

The other two respond, "Wow, that really puts a whole new spin on things."

Re:One electron says to the bartender ...

[diggitzz]

Well the electron only said he was "feeling a bit down" ...=P

I find it humorous that you're willing to tear apart my already-lame joke on something like whether the electron was "feeling" down or claiming to actually "be" down (which he wasn't), whilst completely ignoring the fact that these electrons are feeling and talking to a bartender in the first place, the more obvious impossibilities. ;)

Quantum Teleportation?

[bill_mcgonigle]

So does this mean you can now do Quantum Teleportation without destroying the original? Well, the original could be momentarily destroyed, but if you have a second entangled particle you can rebuild it almost instantly, so it's like it's never destroyed. For all I know it wouldn't surprise me if you could destroy the particle after it's been recreated, seeing how quantum physics exists primarily to remind me how dumb I really am.

Re:Quantum Teleportation?

[wowbagger]

The first particle isn't destroyed in quantum teleportation. What is destroyed is the quantum state of they particle - what spin/polarization it had.

To put it very loosely - in quantum teleportation, the original object would be scrambled. But it would still exist as mass.

Q-Crypto

[Ratso Baggins]

Does this mean (theoretically) you could entangle a third photon to an already entangled pair and then strip it off - of course without harming the originally entangeled pair?

Re:Q-Crypto

[QEDog]

No. Since the three of them are entangled, they all collapse together when one is measured. The important thing about this article is that you need many entangled electrons to make most complicated calculations, the same way you want many logic gates connected to each other in a computer.

Re:hmm..

[C21]

second 0 = point of singularity. I'm sure physicists across the world are wondering exactly what the rules of physics are for such a situation. You are wrong in saying we are close to knowing what second 0.00 is, we are VERY far from understanding even the basic rules that would govern such a situation.

Unfortunately...

[Hard_Code]

...it got "weird", and now the three electrons are not talking to each other.

So would this mean ...

[GreatOgre]

more focus on ternary (I think that's right) computing?

Don't get too excited

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

What they have done is carry out a particular entangling. Getting a bunch of particles entangled is otherwise a commonplace occurence. Any bunch of particles that interact non-trivially is entangled. It's the non-entangled states that are the exception!