Untangling Entanglement…

Chaotic speckle: a pattern resulting from light being scrambled by a complex medium such as a multimode optical fibre. (Courtesy: M Malik and S Goel)

Topics: Entanglement, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Optics

Natalia Herrera-Valencia and colleagues have successfully unscrambled entangled light after it has passed through a 2 m long multimode fibre. Led by Mehul Malik, the team at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tackled the challenge using entanglement itself. The research was done in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Glasgow and is described in a recent paper in Nature Physics.

Light passing through a disordered (or “complex”) medium like atmospheric fog or a multimode fibre gets scattered, albeit in a known manner. As a result, the information carried by the light gets distorted but is preserved, and extra steps are needed to access it. This gets especially tricky for the transport of entangled states of light because the medium muddles up the quantum correlations. The states get “scrambled” and “unscrambling” becomes necessary to retrieve the original entangled states.

Entangled light is unscrambled using entanglement itself, Lavanya Taneja, Physics World

Published by reginaldgoodwin

Engineering Physics, Bachelors of Science, December 1984 Microelectronics & Photonics, Graduate Certificate, February 2016 Nanoengineering, Masters, December 2019 Nanoengineering, Ph.D., Summer 2022

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