Quantum mechanics: the yin and yang of photon entanglement
- Researchers in Canada and Italy have come up with a new way of visualising particles in real time
- The approach could help overcome problems with scalability and time, a professor says
A new real-time way of visualising entangled photons – the basic particles of light – has revealed a yin-yang-like image.
The technique, known as biphoton digital holography, visualised the “wave function” of the photons and was detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Photonics last week by a team of researchers from the University of Ottawa and Sapienza University in Rome.
The work comes four years after the capture of the first photo of quantum entanglement by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
In that image the entanglement looked like a broken doughnut.
The yin-yang symbol represents opposite but connected forces and is known in China as “taijitu”, a concept that dates back to the Song dynasty (960–1279).
“It’s not the first image of quantum entanglement but this is eye-attracting research,” said Yin Zhangqi, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology’s school of physics.