Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
posted by janrinok on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-certain-values-of-massive dept.

Roman Schnabel, a physics professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics has published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters outlining a plan for entangling two "massive" objects. He and his team are still working on a way to actually carry out the plan, but if successful, the group would succeed in entangling two 0.1 kg mass mirrors, which would represent a much larger example of entanglement than anything that has come before—up till now the largest objects to be entangled were of micron size.

Entanglement is of course the odd and perhaps a little eerie situation where two or more objects are connected in a way that cannot yet be explained—measuring one causes the other to be impacted instantaneously. The phenomenon was predicted back in the 1930's by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Over the years, scientists have developed ways to cause particles and then tiny objects to become entangled, but it still was not clear if a way could be found to cause objects large enough to be governed by classical physics to be entangled. In his paper, Schnabel draws up a means of achieving that goal, and notes that he believes it can be done.

http://phys.org/news/2015-08-physicist-unveils-entangling-massive.html

[Also Covered By]: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/aug/03/plan-for-supersized-entanglement-is-unveiled-by-physicist

[Abstract]: http://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.012126


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by seeprime on Thursday August 06 2015, @05:37AM

    by seeprime (5580) on Thursday August 06 2015, @05:37AM (#218964)

    Long distance communication would require the entangled particles be stretched too thin to be practical and the entanglement would end. We can't separate particles very far and keep entanglement. Look up Cooper pairs for more info on how tough it is to separate entangled electrons. Some day maybe. Just not very soon.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:11AM (#218995)

    We've already separated entangled photons over distances of several kilometers without losing entanglement. And what is this nonsense about particles being stretched too thin?