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Quantum Entanglement Destroyed by Heat Revealed in New Study

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Quantum Entanglement Destroyed by Heat Revealed in New Study

Nearly a century ago, physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their individual identities in favor of a collective state that’s greater, and weirder, than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon is called entanglement.

Researchers have a firm understanding of how entanglement works in idealized systems containing just a few particles. But the real world is more complicated. In large arrays of atoms, like the ones that make up the stuff we see and touch, the laws of quantum physics compete with the laws of thermodynamics, and things get messy.

Entanglement Destroyed by Heat

At very low temperatures, entanglement can spread over long distances, enveloping many atoms and giving rise to strange phenomena such as superconductivity. Crank up the heat, though, and atoms jitter about, disrupting the fragile links that bind entangled particles. Physicists have long struggled to pin down the details of this process.

A team of four researchers has proved that entanglement doesn’t just weaken as temperature increases. Rather, in mathematical models of quantum systems such as the arrays of atoms in physical materials, there’s always a specific temperature above which it vanishes completely. “It’s not just that it’s exponentially small,” said Ankur Moitra of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the authors of the new result. “It’s zero.”

The Discovery

The team made their discovery while exploring the theoretical capabilities of future quantum computers—machines that will exploit quantum behavior, including entanglement and superposition, to perform certain calculations far faster than the conventional computers we know today.

The team decided to focus on relatively high temperatures, where researchers suspected that fast quantum algorithms would exist, even though nobody had been able to prove it. They found a way to adapt an old technique from learning theory into a new fast algorithm.

As they were writing up their paper, another team came out with a similar result. But when Álvaro Alhambra, a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, read through a preliminary

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