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To: sourcery; longshadow; Doctor Stochastic; King Prout; RightWhale; PatrickHenry; VadeRetro; ...
There's a report on this work at the PhysicsWeb site, here:

Entanglement reaches new levels

Here's the photo from that link:

There's also a link to a QuickTime animation of the six entangled ions:

Animation

The caption for the animation reads as follows:

The above animation simulates six ions in "cat" states, spinning in two opposite directions at the same time. Each ion spins both left (clockwise, shown in blue) and right (counter-clockwise, shown in red) simultaneously, a condition called a superposition. The six ions are also entangled with each other, so their properties are correlated. If one ion is measured with a laser (shown as a blue beam), that ion's delicate superposition will "collapse" and it will spin in only one direction (clockwise/blue in the animation). Entanglement causes the other five ions to immediately spin in the same direction (they all turn blue).

It's worth keeping in mind that this entanglement is not (in the general case) dependent on how far apart the entangled particles are when a measurement is made. That is, if particles A and B are spin-entangled and head off in opposite directions from each other, and if the spin state of particle A is finally measured 5 billion light years away from its source, then the spin state of particle B (which is also 5 billion light years away from its source, but 10 billion light years away from particle A) is at the instant of measurement determined (whereas before A's state was measured, B's state was not determined). This is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" ("spukhafte Fernwirkungen").

126 posted on 12/04/2005 6:48:48 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
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To: snarks_when_bored

okay... but... does this mean you MIGHT be able to use entanglement for long-distance data comm?


127 posted on 12/04/2005 7:01:03 PM PST by King Prout (many accuse me of being overly literal... this would not be a problem if many were not under-precise)
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