All the neat things about Entanglement are “neat” primarily because they are fundamentally counter-intuitive. They are counter-intuitive because entanglement has been only seen in very low temperature and limited settings. Now there’s a theoretical proposal that claims this limit isn’t as strong a limit as we thought.

The paper that makes the proposal is written up on the Arxiv blog. I’m quoting the beginning of the article because it’s such a great introduction to the idea of Entanglement (and it’s pretty obvious from the description’s first paragraph why I find the phenomenon so evocative when viewed theologically):

“Entanglement is the weird quantum process in which two objects share the same existence. So a measurement on one object immediately influences the other, not matter how far apart they may be.

Entanglement is a strange and fragile thing. Sneeze and it vanishes. The problem is that entanglement is destroyed by any interaction with the environment and these interactions are hard to prevent. So physicists have only ever been able to study and exploit entanglement in systems that do not interact easily with the environment, such as photons, or at temperatures close to absolute zero where the environment becomes more benign.

In fact, physicists believe that there is a fundamental limit to the thermal energies at which entanglement can be usefully exploited. And this limit is tiny, comparable to very lowest temperatures.

Today, Fernando Galve at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain and a few buddies, show how this limit can be dramatically increased. The key behind their idea is the notion of a squeezed state.”

Read the full article here.