Quasars may prove quantum entanglement

8/21/2018 Quasars may prove quantum entanglement – or a 12 billion-year-old conspiracy

https://newatlas.com/quantum-entanglement-quasar-conspiracy/55981/ 1/29

P H Y S I C S

Quasars may prove quantum entanglement –or a 12 billion-year-old conspiracy

Michael Irving | a day ago

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Quantum entanglement – the idea that two particles can remain

inextricably linked across vast distances – is an eerie concept that Einstein

himself had trouble accepting, and yet over the past few decades it's been

experimentally demonstrated time and time again. But are there other

variables involved that we simply don't understand yet? To find out, MIT

researchers have now performed an experiment that provides the strongest

evidence so far of either quantum entanglement, or a "conspiracy" that

dates back over 12 billion years.

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Light from distant quasars has been used as a cosmic "coin flip" to help provide the strongest

evidence so far of quantum entanglement (Credit: draco-zlat/Depositphotos)

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If you were to study a pair of particles that were quantum entangled,

measuring the physical properties of one particle instantaneously affects

that same property of its partner, no matter how much space separates the

two. Classical physics says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of

light – but quantum entanglement breaks the rules by apparently allowing

those particles to communicate more than 10,000 times faster.

When the phenomenon was first noticed by Einstein, who famously called

it "spooky action at a distance," it was considered evidence that our

understanding of quantum theory was incomplete. Einstein said "hidden

variables" must be interfering, which were still to be discovered.

In the 1960s, physicist John Bell tried to quantify the influence of these

hidden variables. If you're testing pairs of particles, Bell says, there's a

certain limit where the correlations become far too regular to be mere

coincidence. Any correlations higher than this limit are most likely

evidence of quantum entanglement. Frustratingly though, experiments

designed to test Bell's inequality could introduce loopholes, through which

those hidden variables might mess with the results again.

Closing the loophole

Those loopholes can be just as spooky as quantum entanglement itself. One

of the hardest to close is the "freedom-of-choice" or "free-will" loophole –

basically, what if some unknown force is tampering with the researcher's

decision about what to measure, making the outcome look like a

correlation when it actually isn't?

One way to close that loophole is to remove the human decision from the

experiment. In earlier tests, scientists used random number generators to

make a split-second choice about what property was going to be measured

between pairs of photons, but even this was thought to leave a gap. Local

reality, after all, might not have too hard a time influencing an event just

nanoseconds before it occurs.

So the MIT researchers decided on the ultimate test: What if the "decision"

has already been made, billions of years before the experiment was ever

conceived?

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Cosmic coin flip

Let's say you're studying two rubber balls to see if they're the same. You can

either check if they're the same color or the same size, and to make that

decision you flip a coin to randomize it. That's essentially what the MIT

researchers were doing in the latest experiment – but the coin was flipped 8

billion years ago. Hidden variables are going to have a hard time interfering

with that.

The researchers beamed pairs of entangled photons in opposite directions

down a tunnel, towards detectors at either end. Before the photons struck

the detectors, a "coin flip" changed the angle of those detectors in order to

measure a different property of the photons.

In this case, the "coin" was light from two distant quasars. The researchers

used two large telescopes in the Canary Islands to monitor these incredibly

bright celestial objects and make the decision. If the light of a single photon

from the quasar was red, it would tilt the detector to one angle. If it was

blue, it would tilt a different way.

The kicker is that one of these quasars is 7.8 billion light-years away, and

the other is 12.2 billion light-years, meaning the light from them took that

long to arrive here. The decision about how to measure the entangled

photons was up to 12.2 billion years in the making.

"The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, so any alternative mechanism –

different from quantum mechanics – that might have produced our results

by exploiting this loophole would've had to be in place long before even

there was a planet Earth, let alone an MIT," says David Kaiser, co-author of

the study. "So we've pushed any alternative explanations back to very early

in cosmic history."



The researchers ran this same experiment twice for 15 minutes each time,

using two different pairs of quasars. Overall, they measured more than

30,000 pairs of entangled particles, which showed correlations far beyond

Bell's limit. The team then calculated that the chance of hidden classical

variables messing with the results would be about one in a hundred billion

billion.

"If some conspiracy is happening to simulate quantum mechanics by a

mechanism that is actually classical, that mechanism would have had to

begin its operations – somehow knowing exactly when, where, and how

this experiment was going to be done – at least 7.8 billion years ago," says

Alan Guth, co-author of the study. "That seems incredibly implausible, so

we have very strong evidence that quantum mechanics is the right

explanation."

The researchers admit that there's still an extremely tiny chance that the

results came through a loophole. In the future, the team plans to run a

similar test using some of the oldest light in the universe – microwave

radiation left over from the Big Bang itself.

The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Source: MIT

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