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Physicists establish 'spooky' quantum communication |
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09/07/07 |
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Physicists at the University of Michigan have coaxed two separate atoms to communicate with a sort of quantum intuition that Albert Einstein called "spooky."
In doing so, the researchers have made an advance toward super-fast quantum computing. The research could also be a building block for a quantum internet. Scientists used light to establish what's called "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped a meter apart in separate enclosures (think of entangling like controlling the outcome of one coin flip with the outcome of a separate coin flip). A paper on the findings appears in the Sept. 6 edition of the journal Nature. "This linkage between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Professor Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator who did this research while at U-M, but is now at the University of Maryland. "Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing." Source - Physorg |