A single human cell contains roughly 100 trillion atoms, so that can be enough to make you grasp a brief idea of how small atoms are. Now imagine how many atoms might exist across 20 miles! That’s a number that you can write only by using powers.
Physicists at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) can now boast about quantum entangling two atoms that were positioned 20 miles away from one another, according to iflscience.com. The atoms are of rubidium, meaning a soft and silvery-white metallic element from the alkali metals group.
A new record
The experiment in question represents a new record. By quantum entangling the two atoms, we understand that two such particles get connected in such a way that if you change one of them, the other one gets automatically changed as well. You’re practically sending information from one point in space to another in no time.
Tim van Leent, who is the lead author of the paper, explained:
The significance of our experiment is that we actually entangle two stationary particles – that is to say, atoms that function as quantum memories,
This is much more difficult than entangling photons, but it opens up many more application possibilities.
One interesting fact about atoms is that it’s impossible to create an accurate graphic representation for them. One of the reasons is that the nucleus is thousands of times smaller than the atom itself. Great physicists such as Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac had a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around the incredible trait of atoms back in the 1920s.
Physicists even hope that the new record in quantum entanglement might represent a new step toward developing a quantum internet. That would allow information to travel even faster than before.
The new findings were published in Nature.
