University of Glasgow
In an amazing first, scientists have captured the first actual photo of quantum entanglement in the world. It's an extremely strange phenomenon that physicist Albert Einstein has famously described it as 'spooky action at a distance.'
The picture was captured by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and it's so breathtaking we can't stop staring.
It may not look like much, but stop and think about it for a second: the fuzzy grey image is the first time we have seen the particle interaction which underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.
According to Science Alert, quantum entanglement occurs when two particles become inextricably linked, and whatever happens to one immediately affects the other, no matter how far apart they are.
The particular photo depicts entanglement between two photons - two light particles. They are interacting and - for a brief moment - sharing physical states.
Paul-Antoine Moreau, the first author of the paper wherein the image was unveiled, told the BBC the photo was "an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature".
To capture the incredible picture, Moreau and a team of physicists created a system which blasted out streams of entangled photons at what they described as 'non-conventional objects'.
The experiment involved capturing four pictures of the photons under four different phase transitions. You can see the full image below:
Moreau et al., Science Advances, 2019
What you are looking at here is a composite of multiple photos of the photons as they go through a series of four-phase transitions.
The physicists split the entangled photons up and ran one beam through a liquid crystal material known as β-barium borate, triggering four-phase transitions.
At the same time, they captured photographs of the entangled pair going through the same phase transitions, although it had not passed through the liquid crystal.
You can see the setup below: The entangled beam of photons comes from the bottom left, one half of the entangled pair splits to the left and passes through the four-phase filters. The others that go straight ahead did not go through the filters, but underwent the same phase changes.
Moreau et al., Science Advances, 2019
The camera captured images of these at the same time, showing they'd both shifted the same way despite being split. In other words, they were entangled.
While Einstein made quantum entanglement famous, the late physicist John Stewart Bell helped define quantum entanglement and established a test known as 'Bell inequality'. If you can break Bell inequality, you can confirm real quantum entanglement.
The research was published in Science Advances.
COMMENTS