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Quarks show that quantum entanglement holds at high energies

By comunicacion / September 19, 2024

By smashing protons together at blinding speeds, scientists have shown that pairs of quarks display the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. The result could lead to fresh insight about one of the forces holding nuclei together.

By Martin Hentschinski, former postdoc at the IFT.

If two particles are entangled, the quantum mechanical state of each particle cannot be described independently of that of the other. Entanglement has been observed several times and is key to developments in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. In a paper in Nature, the ATLAS Collaboration reports the detection of entanglement between a top quark and its antiparticle, the anti-top quark, at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The observation is not unexpected. Indeed, it would have been a huge surprise to find that the pair wasn’t entangled. But to observe entanglement at such high energies is an astonishing feat — all the more so because it was detected in a pair of quarks, the fundamental particles making up all atomic nuclei.