New Micro-Ring Resonator Creates Quantum Entanglement On a Silicon Chip

Zothecula writes: The quantum entanglement of particles, such as photons, is a prerequisite for the new and future technologies of quantum computing, telecommunications, and cyber security. Real-world applications that take advantage of this technology, however, will not be fully realized until devices that produce such quantum states leave the realms of the laboratory and are made both small and energy efficient enough to be embedded in electronic equipment. In this vein, European scientists (abstract) have created and installed a tiny "ring-resonator" on a microchip that is claimed to produce copious numbers of entangled photons while using very little power to do so.

Comments

removing the speed of light barrier

[WamBamBoozle]

Entanglement communicates state by some mechanism that has no measurable latency. Making a computing device based on entanglement would be amazing.

Re:removing the speed of light barrier

[IAMBatman]

No, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... that doesn't work.

Re:removing the speed of light barrier

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why this got modded insightful. Maybe funny would be appropriate, but otherwise it is just word salad. I don't normally like calling one out on spelling, but spelling it plank instead of Planck tends to be a subtle hint too...

But entanglement has nothing to do with Planck scale in quantum mechanics, and "below the Planck layer" is meaningless. Unless you literally mean "below the plank layer" and are talking about an experiment setup below the floorboards.

Re:removing the speed of light barrier

[nichogenius]

You still can't beat the speed of light barrier. Entanglement is disrupted as soon as soon as you observe it. This means that just by reading your 1 bit inter-galactic text message, the link between the two breaks. All you know for sure is that the bit you got is the opposite of the bit the other end got. As you can't manipulate the outcome of either entangled particle without disrupting the entanglement, you can't pass any non-random information.

This is a rough example of how it would work. Before you leave on your inter-galactic flight, you take a quarter with you. This is no ordinary quarter... it's actually an exact match and entangled (coupled) with a quarter that you are leaving at home with a friend. When you finally decide to communicate with your magic quarter, all you have to do is flip it. If you get heads, then you know for sure that your friend back at home got tails and visa-versa. The problem is, once you flip the quarter, the entanglement is lost and now it's back to a regular quarter. Another problem is that you have no way of knowing when or if your buddy back at home flipped his quarter, you just know that when he did/does, he will get the opposite result as you.

The best you could do with this is to coordinate random number generation across light years. Just remember, for every bit of data you want to 'coordinate' with someone remotely, that's one entangled particle that you have to observe, breaking the entanglement and thereby spending it.

The concept of entanglement is cool, but it's not THAT cool. Sorry. Also, Einstein never really accepted that any form of communication happens between entangled particles. He just figured that during the process of entanglement, the two had to be completely isolated from the surrounding universe and kept that way until it was time to observe them. He figured it was more like writing a yes and a no on two different pieces of paper, randomizing them, separating them, then reading them. He didn't believe the pieces of paper would actually coordinate with each other to display the opposite of it's counterpart, just that they were in a mutually exclusive state to begin with and kept isolated enough that their mutually exclusive state would persist.