Increasing Photon Entanglement Improves Measurement

Category: Science & Technology
Posted: July 12, 2012 12:26PM
Author: Guest_Jim_*

Quantum mechanics offers a great deal for the future of computing thanks to phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. Together information can be reliably stored, read, and processed in ways not possible with modern computing. There is a catch though as quantum mechanics makes collecting information very tricky, because the act of collecting the information can damage the system and cause information to be lost. Fortunately researchers at the University of Strathclyde, as reported by Springer, have discovered that increasing the complexity of entangled photons actually makes it easier to get information from them.

Entanglement is a phenomenon which connects particles together by having them share states. These states could be something like the direction of their spin or, in the case of photons, their polarization. What the researchers found is that having more entangled states within a pair of photons makes it easier to gather information from this. This effect is so strong that with a sufficiently high dimension of entanglement, even an imperfect measurement can still collect information with high certainty.

This is a major finding for the future of quantum computing and networking as it makes the system both robust and easier to work with. Also, the more entangled states the photons have the more information they can store, which will greatly increase information density.

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