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Quantum mechanics

Entangled families

Nature volume 455, pages 180–181 (2008)Cite this article

Quantum entanglement comes in a rich variety of types and families if more than two particles are involved. Experiments with photons are opening up fresh ways to systematically study multi-particle entanglement.

In 1935, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, coined the term 'entanglement' to describe two quantum systems that are intimately correlated — even more strongly than is classically possible. Although its impact on the foundations of quantum physics was envisaged from the beginning (entanglement is at the heart of his famous cat paradox), Schrödinger could not have anticipated that it would become a basic concept in quantum information processing. Today, we know that when three or more particles become entangled, many surprising features occur that are of relevance both for fundamental studies and for practical applications. Such multi-particle entanglement exists in increasingly complicated families of entangled states, but these have proved difficult to study. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Wieczorek et al.1 demonstrate a simple experimental set-up capable of observing an entire family of states accessible to four entangled photons.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Markus Aspelmeyer is at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1090 Vienna, Austria. markus.aspelmeyer@quantum.at ,

    Markus Aspelmeyer

  2. Jens Eisert is in the Department of Physics, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany, and Imperial College London, UK. jense@qipc.org,

    Jens Eisert

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  1. Markus Aspelmeyer
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  2. Jens Eisert
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Aspelmeyer, M., Eisert, J. Entangled families. Nature 455, 180–181 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/455180a

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