Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger was quoted by Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences To discover that invisible particles, such as photons, can be combined or “entangled” with each other even if they are separated by great distances, a field that puzzled Albert Einstein himself. Did, who once referred to it in a letter as “spooky action at a distance”.
what is quantum mechanics,
Classical physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. Until the early 20th century, it was believed to be a fundamental law of physics that was followed in everything in nature. But then scientists began to study particles such as atoms, electrons and light waves that did not obey these rules. And so, the field of quantum mechanics was born, which was led by Max PlanckNiels Bohr and Albert Einstein, in an attempt to investigate the “strange” laws that bound such particles.
For example, quantum mechanics tells us that light can be both a particle and a wave – depending on how it is observed. But unless it is observed, light is neither a particle nor a wave. This lack of definition led Einstein to remark, “God does not play dice with the universe”. Since then, physicists have been investigating the laws governing this uncertainty.
A leap to quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, in contrast to classical physics, allows two or more particles to exist in an entangled state—what happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, Even if the particles are far apart from each other. Physicists initially assumed that this coordinate was the result of hidden variables – Einstein described it as “spooky action at a distance”.
But in the 1960s, John Stewart Bell discovered that there are no hidden variables at play—in fact, the coordination between entangled particles is a matter of coincidence when measuring the properties of one of the particles.
Bell developed a mathematical inequality that says “if there are hidden variables, the relationship between the results of a large number of measurements will never exceed a certain value”. However, quantum mechanics shows that it is possible to exceed this value, allowing greater correlations between results through hidden variables.
Exceeding this value proves that there is no unexplained “scary action” and that the world is governed by quantum mechanics.
Over a period of several decades, this year’s Nobel laureates have built on Bell’s work. American physicist john clauser developed a realistic experiment by passing entangled photons through polarizing filters (commonly used in sunglasses to block light at certain angles) to test Bell’s inequality. His experiments showed a clear violation of Bell’s inequality, confirming that there were no hidden variables at play.
But Clauser’s experiment had its limitations – the settings were fixed to measure entangled photons passing through the polarization filter, which meant that it was possible that the experimental setup itself was unable to detect some of the particles known to be hidden. variable was controlled. Alain Aspect, a French physicist at the Université Paris-Saclay, sought to develop an experiment that left only its source of entangled photons to overcome this potential bias by changing the measurement settings so that the setup itself would affect the results. Don’t do it
Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist at the University of Vienna, was among the first to explore quantum systems that use more than two entangled particles, which now form the basis of quantum calculations and the ability to manipulate entangled particles. allow. Among his most notable achievements is the discovery of quantum teleportation, which allows particles to take on unknown quantum characteristics even from other particles over long distances.
But what do these advances in quantum mechanics mean for the world? Transistors and lasers were developed as a result of the first quantum revolution.
In this new era, the ability to manage and manipulate systems of entangled particles will give researchers better tools to “build quantum computers, improve measurements, build quantum networks, and establish secure quantum encrypted communications.” Quantum computers can perform complex calculations that are far beyond the capabilities of traditional computers, which rely on binary signals (1s and 0s) to store and process information. Already, quantum computing has shown promise in chemical and biological engineering and cyber security. Fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Big Data also benefit from computing systems that can handle large datasets and run complex simulations.