What works for radioactive material does not work for entangled particles, say Eberly and Yu. Instead of slow decay, there is a sudden and abrupt death. The two particles remain, but the link between them is destroyed. "This is a feature that people did not expect," said Bei Lok Hu, a professor of physcis at the University of Maryland. Even stranger, said Hu, is that suddenly disentangled particles can just as suddenly be reborn. For now, the concepts of ESD and entanglement rebirth are only useful to physicists. There are no current practical consumer applications for entanglement. The hope, however, is that eventually entanglement will lead to breakthroughs in cryptography, computing, even teleportation. The emergence of ESD could be a problem for these fields; permanently losing entangled information while, say, beaming from one place to another, Star Trek-style, would be a big problem, say both Eberly and Hu. "Entanglement has a life of its own, and in some situations you see particles die, and sometimes they never come back again." said Hu. Related Links: |
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