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Quantum Physic

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"Spooky Action at a Distance" Confirmed by New Quantum Experiment. Albert Einstein may have been the greatest mind of the 20th century, but the great physicist famously disliked some of the weirder implications of quantum physics.

"Spooky Action at a Distance" Confirmed by New Quantum Experiment

Now, nearly a century after his protests, physicists may have proven one of the points that he doubted the most. According to quantum mechanics, a particle can be described as a wave that spreads out over a great distance. Yet the particle is still just one particle. You can't detect it in two places at once. When physicists observe the particle in a particular location, they say that the wave function—the mathematics that describes how a particle could be in multiple places at once—has collapsed. Read this next: Seal Attacks And Devours Guts Of 5 Sharks In One Sitting. A Single Photon Entangles Thousands Of Atoms. Quantum entanglement, the process of linking atoms so that a change to one alters others, has taken a huge leap forward.

A Single Photon Entangles Thousands Of Atoms

Even by the standards of quantum's strange laws, it is a feat worthy of a subatomic Helen of Troy for a single photon to entangle almost 3,000 atoms. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that can occur in the puzzling world of the very small, where particles can have their fates locked together. According to theoretical models, if one of these particles is affected in some way, for example by having its spin altered, the others will immediately experience a matching change, even if separated by a great distance from the altered particle. Einstein famously mocked the idea, but experimental evidence has supported what was once pure theory.

Particles have been entangled while separated by large distances, and the phenomenon has even been used to make art. Professor Vladan Vuletić of MIT is on a quest to entangle large groups of atoms. Credit: McConnell et al. An Entangled Portrait of Schrödinger’s Cat. The photograph above is of an invisible cat, achieved through the process of quantum entanglement, the same phenomenon that might one day allow for a sort of teleportation.

An Entangled Portrait of Schrödinger’s Cat

Confused? Let’s backtrack. First, there is sadly, no macroscopic invisible cat, only a stencil of a cat. And the stencil is only invisible at certain wavelengths, having been made from silicon transparent to infrared light. The silicon blocks red light however, and Dr. Quantum entanglement is the process by which two or more subatomic particles are linked together so that changes to one inevitably affect the others. The experiment, reported in Nature, was conducted by shining a laser on crystals that produce entangled photons of different wavelengths. A camera detecting the photons cannot tell which crystal they come from. Nature. In 2009, researchers demonstrated something similar known as ghost imaging. As Lemos puts it, “The photons used to illuminate the object do not have to be detected at all.” Two New Sub-Atomic Particles Discovered at CERN. Two never-before-seen particles have just been detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, by the international LHCb collaboration.

Two New Sub-Atomic Particles Discovered at CERN

Known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, the new particles belong to the baryon family. Baryons are made from three fundamental, subatomic particles called quarks, bound together by a strong force. The more familiar protons and neutrons are also baryons -- these combine with electrons to make up everything on the periodic table. “The building blocks of all known things, including cars, planets, stars and people, are quarks and electrons, which are tied together by strong, electromagnetic forces,” Steven Blusk of Syracuse University explains in a news release. And the quarks in these newly discovered baryons aren’t even the same type: Each of the new particles contains one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. The existence of these particles were previously predicted in 2009, but no one has ever seen them until now.

When Parallel Worlds Collide . . . Quantum Mechanics Is Born. Parallel universes – worlds where the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hit, or where Australia was colonised by the Portuguese – are a staple of science fiction.

When Parallel Worlds Collide . . . Quantum Mechanics Is Born

But are they real? In a radical paper published this week in Physical Review X, we (Dr Michael Hall and I from Griffith University and Dr Dirk-André Deckert from the University of California) propose not only that parallel universes are real, but that they are not quite parallel – they can “collide”.