Chinese Physicists Measure the Speed of Information Transfer in Quantum Entanglement

A team of Chinese physicists are performing some serious experiments and making a lot of advancement in the field of quantum mechanics. This team recently has tried to measure the speed of quantum entanglement- more demonstratively known as “spooky action at a distance”, as Einstein called it. The easy and technical definition of Quantum Entanglement could be: “Quantum entanglement arises when particles such as electrons, photons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and more likely even small diamonds interact physically and then become unconnected; the type of contact is such that each resultant member of a pair of particles is accurately designated by the same quantum mechanical state, which is unfixed in terms of important factors such as polarization, spin, momentum, position, etc.”

Information in quantum entanglement transfers very fast and when most people describe this fascinating process, they’ll describe the information transfer as ‘instantaneous’ or ‘near-instantaneous’ (still having problem in understanding Quantum Entanglement then please read this article). Numerous research teams have tried to measure the definite speed seen in the transfer of information in entangled systems, but have failed, and the reasons of failure were mostly flawed methodology dealing in quantum nonlocality.

People mostly ask if this process violates relativity, of course, this violates relativity because nothing can travel faster than light. A lot of work is being done in this field and a growing number of physicists believe we’ll achieve faster-than-light communication by cleverly using quantum entanglement to our advantage. Now getting back to Chinese team, the Chinese physicists entangled pairs of photons, in order to get this measurement, then they transferred half of the pair to receiving units, named Alice and Bob. These receiving units, were placed 15.3 km apart in an east-west orientation – the receivers were oriented in this fashion to minimize intervention from Earth’s rotation, which is an important issue at this scale. The team then observed the first half of the entangled pair and waited to see how quickly the other half assumed the same state. They repeated this process for over 12 hours to help ensure accuracy of their measurements.

The team came back and said that quantum entanglement transfers information at around 3-trillion meters per second or in other words you can say four orders of magnitude faster than light. We cannot deny one fact at the moment that our technology and methodologies aren’t sensitive enough to measure speeds at this scale.

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