Sam Wormley
2015-07-21 23:54:35 UTC
Drawing a line between quantum and classical world
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-line-quantum-classical-world.html
Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of 20th century
science, yet physicists have struggled to find a clear boundary
between our everyday world and what Albert Einstein called the
"spooky" features of the quantum world, including cats that could be
both alive and dead, and photons that can communicate with each other
across space instantaneously.
For the past 60 years, the best guide to that boundary has been a
theorem called Bell's Inequality, but now a new paper shows that
Bell's Inequality is not the guidepost it was believed to be, which
means that as the world of quantum computing brings quantum
strangeness closer to our daily lives, we understand the frontiers of
that world less well than scientists have thought.
In the new paper, published in the July 20 edition of Optica,
University of Rochester researchers show that a classical beam of
light that would be expected to obey Bell's Inequality can fail this
test in the lab, if the beam is properly prepared to have a
particular feature: entanglement.
Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of 20th century
science, yet physicists have struggled to find a clear boundary
between our everyday world and what Albert Einstein called the
"spooky" features of the quantum world, including cats that could be
both alive and dead, and photons that can communicate with each other
across space instantaneously.
For the past 60 years, the best guide to that boundary has been a
theorem called Bell's Inequality, but now a new paper shows that
Bell's Inequality is not the guidepost it was believed to be, which
means that as the world of quantum computing brings quantum
strangeness closer to our daily lives, we understand the frontiers of
that world less well than scientists have thought.
In the new paper, published in the July 20 edition of Optica,
University of Rochester researchers show that a classical beam of
light that would be expected to obey Bell's Inequality can fail this
test in the lab, if the beam is properly prepared to have a
particular feature: entanglement.
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to the discussion of physics, news from the physics
community, and physics-related social issues.
