Scientists have finally uncovered a quantum counterpart to Carnot’s famed second law, showing that entanglement—once thought stubbornly irreversible—can be shuffled back and forth without loss if you plug in a clever “entanglement battery.”
I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.
I went ahead and read the article. I know a bit about quantum computing. Here’s my summary of it:
Entanglement is a useful resource for quantum networking, enabling things like quantum-secure communication and distributed quantum computing.
TLDR The paper describes algorithms to more efficiently create a form of entanglement that’s useful from the error-prone “dirty” entanglement you get from entanglement-generating hardware.
When you make entanglement, it often doesn’t come out perfect, and you need a technique to “distill” “good” entangled states out of a collection of “dirty” entangled states.
The typical “rules” for this involve two parties that create dirty shared entanglement (shared entanglement means a pair of entangled qubits, but each party has one of the qubits). They can then do whatever they like with their qubits individually and can communicate (over classical channels e.g. the internet) but they can’t do anything “quantum” between the two of them.
This paper analyzes the case where there is a 3rd party that follows these same rules but has been previously set up as an “entanglement battery”, which means preparing it in a special state from which entanglement can be “borrowed” or “returned” to the battery using only local operations and classical communication.
In particular it’s looking for “reversible” (meaning no loss in total entanglement over the process) “entanglement manipulation” (changing the entanglement from one form into another, presumably more useful form). It goes into a lot of analysis as to what the limits on this process are, and makes analogies to how engines work in thermodynamics.
I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.
I went ahead and read the article. I know a bit about quantum computing. Here’s my summary of it:
Entanglement is a useful resource for quantum networking, enabling things like quantum-secure communication and distributed quantum computing.
TLDR The paper describes algorithms to more efficiently create a form of entanglement that’s useful from the error-prone “dirty” entanglement you get from entanglement-generating hardware.
When you make entanglement, it often doesn’t come out perfect, and you need a technique to “distill” “good” entangled states out of a collection of “dirty” entangled states.
The typical “rules” for this involve two parties that create dirty shared entanglement (shared entanglement means a pair of entangled qubits, but each party has one of the qubits). They can then do whatever they like with their qubits individually and can communicate (over classical channels e.g. the internet) but they can’t do anything “quantum” between the two of them.
This paper analyzes the case where there is a 3rd party that follows these same rules but has been previously set up as an “entanglement battery”, which means preparing it in a special state from which entanglement can be “borrowed” or “returned” to the battery using only local operations and classical communication.
In particular it’s looking for “reversible” (meaning no loss in total entanglement over the process) “entanglement manipulation” (changing the entanglement from one form into another, presumably more useful form). It goes into a lot of analysis as to what the limits on this process are, and makes analogies to how engines work in thermodynamics.
Thanks for this :-)
So, this magazine isn’t one of the ones that has a hard prohibition on rephrasing headlines, from what I can tell.
You could simply edit the title to better reflect the actual content of the article.