Entangled Particles Face Sudden Death

Jan. 29, 2009 -- Two particles can become entangled so completely that a change in one immediately affects the other, no matter how far away it is. Until now, scientists have assumed such a marriage would endure forever.

But in a paper published today in the journal Science, two physicists show that entangled particles can suddenly and irrevocably lose their connection, a phenomenon called Entanglement Sudden Death, or ESD.

"The degree of information entangled can disappear faster than the information itself," said Joseph Eberly, a physicist at the University of Rochester, who, along with Ting Yu, co-authored the paper. "It's completely non-classical physics."

Entanglement is one of the stranger products of quantum mechanics, the area of physics that allows objects to fall through tables and postulates that teleportation is possible.

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There are a variety of ways to entangle particles, depending on what kind of particles you're working with.

Particles of light, called photons, for example, can be entangled by shining high-energy beams on beta barium borate crystals. A high-energy photon breaks down into two lower-energy photons that, for example, may spin in opposite directions. If the spin of one photon is known, the spin of the other can be deduced, no matter how far apart the two become.

As those entangled particles move through the environment, other particles and fields degrade the connection -- but some ties remain, it has long been thought.

Eberly describes the previous model of entangled particle decay like radioactive half-life -- the period of time over which half of a given radioactive material will decay into other elements. No matter how much time passes, there will still be at least a tiny speck of radioactive material there.