Particles in Love: Quantum Mechanics Explored in New Study (NASA)

Here's a love story at the smallest scales imaginable: particles of light. It is possible to have particles that are so intimately linked that a change to one affects the other, even when they are separated at a distance.
This idea, called "entanglement," is part of the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, a description of the way the world works at the level of atoms and particles that are even smaller. Quantum mechanics says that at these very tiny scales, some properties of particles are based entirely on probability. In other words, nothing is certain until it happens.
Testing Bell's Theorem
Albert Einstein did not entirely believe that the laws of quantum mechanics described reality. He and others postulated that there must be some hidden variables at work, which would allow quantum systems to be predictable. In 1964, however, John Bell published the idea that any model of physical reality with such hidden variables also must allow for the instantaneous influence of one particle on another. While Einstein proved that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, particles can still affect each other when they are far apart according to Bell.

Scientists consider Bell's theorem an important foundation for modern physics. While many experiments have taken place to try to prove his theorem, no one was able to run a full, proper test of the experiment Bell would have needed until recently. In 2015, three separate studies were published on this topic, all consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics and entanglement.
"What's exciting is that in some sense, we're doing experimental philosophy," said Krister Shalm, physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colorado. Shalm is lead author on one of the 2015 studies testing Bell's theorem. "Humans have always had certain expectations of how the world works, and when quantum mechanics came along, it seemed to behave differently."
How 'Alice and Bob' Test Quantum Mechanics
The paper by Shalm, Marsili and colleagues was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, with the mind-bending title "Strong Loophole-Free Test of Local Realism."
"Our paper and the other two published last year show that Bell was right: any model of the world that contains hidden variables must also allow for entangled particles to influence one another at a distance," said Francesco Marsili of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who collaborated with Shalm.
An analogy helps to understand the experiment, which was conducted at a NIST laboratory in Boulder:
Imagine that A and B are entangled photons. A is sent to Alice and B is sent to Bob, who are located 607 feet (185 meters) apart.
Alice and Bob poke and prod at their photons in all kinds of ways to get a sense of their properties. Without talking to each other, they then each randomly decide how to measure their photons, using random number generators to guide their decisions. When Alice and Bob compare notes, they are surprised to find that the results of their independent experiments are correlated. In other words, even at a distance, measuring one photon of the entangled pair affects the properties of the other photon.
"It's as if Alice and Bob try to tear the two photons apart, but their love still persists," Shalm said. In other words, the entangled photons behave as if they are two parts of a single system, even when separated in space.
Alice and Bob -- representing actual photon detectors -- then repeat this with many other pairs of entangled photons, and the phenomenon persists.
In reality, the photon detectors are not people, but superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs). SNSPDs are metal strips that are cooled until they become "superconducting," meaning they lose their electric resistance. A photon hitting this strip causes it to turn into a normal metal again momentarily, so the resistance of the strip jumps from zero to a finite value. This change in resistance allows the researchers to record the event.
To make this experiment happen in a laboratory, the big challenge is to avoid losing photons as they get sent to the Alice and Bob detectors through an optical fiber. JPL and NIST developed SNSPDs with worldrecord performance, demonstrating more than 90 percent efficiency and low "jitter," or uncertainty on the time of arrival of a photon. This experiment would not have been possible without SNSPDs.
Why This is Useful
The design of this experiment could potentially be used in cryptography -- making information and communications secure -- as it involves generating random numbers.
"The same experiment that tells us something deep about how the world is constructed also can be used for these applications that require you to keep your information safe," Shalm said.
Cryptography isn't the only application of this research. Detectors similar to those used for the experiment, which were built by JPL and NIST, could eventually also be used for deep-space optical communication. With a high efficiency and low uncertainty about the time of signal arrival, these detectors are well-suited for transmitting information with pulses of light in the optical spectrum.
"Right now we have the Deep Space Network to communicate with spacecraft around the solar system, which encodes information in radio signals. With optical communications, we could increase the data rate of that network 10- to 100-fold," Marsili said.
Deep space optical communication using technology similar to the detectors in Marsili's experiment was demonstrated with NASA's Lunar Atmosphere Dust and Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which orbited the moon from October 2013 to April 2014. A technology mission called the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration, with components on LADEE and on the ground, downlinked data encoded in laser pulses, and made use of ground receivers based on SNSPDs.
NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is working on the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) mission. The mission proposes to revolutionize the way we send and receive data, video and other information, using lasers to encode and transmit data at rates 10 to 100 times faster than today's fastest radio-frequency systems, using significantly less mass and power.
"Information can never travel faster than the speed of light -- Einstein was right about that. But through optical communications research, we can increase the amount of information we send back from space," Marsili said. "The fact that the detectors from our experiment have this application creates great synergy between the two endeavors."
And so, what began as the study of "love" between particles is contributing to innovations in communications between space and Earth. "Love makes the world go 'round," and it may, in a sense, help us learn about other worlds.

Physicists figure out how to retrieve information from a black hole

Black holes earn their name because their gravity is so strong not even light can escape from them. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of hand to retrieve a speck of information that's been dropped into a black hole. The calculation touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: how all of the information trapped in a black hole leaks out as the black hole "evaporates." Many theorists think that must happen, but they don't know how.
Unfortunately for them, the new scheme may do more to underscore the difficulty of the larger "black hole information problem" than to solve it. "Maybe others will be able to go further with this, but it's not obvious to me that it will help," says Don Page, a theorist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who was not involved in the work.
You can shred your tax returns, but you shouldn't be able to destroy information by tossing it into a black hole. That's because, even though quantum mechanics deals in probabilities—such as the likelihood of an electron being in one location or another—the quantum waves that give those probabilities must still evolve predictably, so that if you know a wave's shape at one moment you can predict it exactly at any future time. Without such "unitarity" quantum theory would produce nonsensical results such as probabilities that don't add up to 100%.
But suppose you toss some quantum particles into a black hole. At first blush, the particles and the information they encode is lost. That's a problem, as now part of the quantum state describing the combined black hole-particles system has been obliterated, making it impossible to predict its exact evolution and violating unitarity.
Physicists think they have a way out. In 1974, British theorist Stephen Hawking argued that black holes can radiate particles and energy. Thanks to quantum uncertainty, empty space roils with pairs of particles flitting in and out of existence. Hawking realized that if a pair of particles from the vacuum popped into existence straddling the black hole's boundary then one particle could fly into space, while the other would fall into the black hole. Carrying away energy from the black hole, the exiting Hawking radiation should cause a black hole to slowly evaporate. Some theorists suspect information reemerges from the black hole encoded in the radiation—although how remains unclear as the radiation is supposedly random.
Now, Aidan Chatwin-Davies, Adam Jermyn, and Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have found an explicit way to retrieve information from one quantum particle lost in a black hole, using Hawking radiation and the weird concept of quantum teleportation.
Quantum teleportation enables two partners, Alice and Bob, to transfer the delicate quantum state of one particle such as an electron to another. In quantum theory, an electron can spin one way (up), the other way (down), or literally both ways at once. In fact, its state can be described by a point on a globe in which north pole signifies up and the south pole signifies down. Lines of latitude denote different mixtures of up and down, and lines of longitude denote the "phase," or how the up and down parts mesh. However, if Alice tries to measure that state, it will "collapse" one way or the other, up or down, squashing information such as the phase. So she can't measure the state and send the information to Bob, but must transfer it intact.
To do that Alice and Bob can share an additional pair of electrons connected by a special quantum link called entanglement. The state of either particle in the entangled pair is uncertain—it simultaneously points everywhere on the globe—but the states are correlated so that if Alice measures her particle from the pair and finds it spinning, say, up, she'll know instantly that Bob's electron is spinning down. So Alice has two electrons—the one whose state she wants to teleport and her half of the entangled pair. Bob has just the one from the entangled pair.
To perform the teleportation, Alice takes advantage of one more strange property of quantum mechanics: that measurement not only reveals something about a system, it also changes its state. So Alice takes her two unentangled electrons and performs a measurement that "projects" them into an entangled state. That measurement breaks the entanglement between the pair of electrons that she and Bob share. But at the same time, it forces Bob's electron into the state that her to-be-teleported electron was in. It's as if, with the right measurement, Alice squeezes the quantum information from one side of the system to the other.
Chatwin-Davies and colleagues realized that they could teleport the information about the state of an electron out of a black hole, too. Suppose that Alice is floating outside the black hole with her electron. She captures one photon from a pair born from Hawking radiation. Much like an electron, the photon can spin in either of two directions, and it will be entangled with its partner photon that has fallen into the black hole. Next, Alice measures the total angular momentum, or spin, of the black hole—both its magnitude and, roughly speaking, how much it lines up with a particular axis. With those two bits of information in hand, she then tosses in her electron, losing it forever.
But Alice can still recover the information about the state of that electron, the team reports in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters. All she has to do is once again measure the spin and orientation of the black hole. Those measurements then entangle the black hole and the in-falling photon. They also teleport the state of the electron to the photon that Alice captured. Thus, the information from the lost electron is dragged back into the observable universe.
Chatwin-Davies stresses that the scheme is not a plan for a practical experiment. After all, it would require Alice to almost instantly measure the spin of a black hole as massive as the sun to within a single atom's spin. "We like to joke around that Alice is the most advanced scientist in the universe," he says.
The scheme also has major limitations. In particular, as the authors note, it works for one quantum particle, but not for two or more. That's because the recipe exploits the fact that the black hole conserves angular momentum, so that its final spin is equal to its initial spin plus that of the electron. That trick enables Alice to get out exactly two bits of information—the total spin and its projection along one axis—and that's just enough information to specify the latitude and longitude of quantum state of one particle. But it's not nearly enough to recapture all the information trapped in a black hole, which typically forms when a star collapses upon itself.
To really tackle the black hole information problem, theorists would also have to account for the complex states of the black hole's interior, says Stefan Leichenauer, a theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Unfortunately, all of the big questions we have about black holes are precisely about these internal workings," he says. "So, this protocol, though interesting in its own right, will probably not teach us much about the black hole information problem in general."
However, delving into the interior of black holes would require a quantum mechanical theory of gravity. Of course, developing such a theory is perhaps the grandest goal in all of theoretical physics, one that has eluded physicists for decades.