You Can Now See Quantum Mechanics! Hair Sized Objects Entangled!

Clever engineers managed to entangle micro-oscillators and micro-drums. While both of them are right on the edge of being visible to the naked eye its still objects made from many billions of atoms.

Slideshow entanglement
By David Koryagin CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Quantum entanglement is one of the weirdest ways in which quantum mechanics shows itself to us. When two objects get entangled they always affect each other no matter how far apart from each other they are. Potentially even light years apart. Usually, we observe entanglement only with elementary particles and things of similar tiny sizes. But scientists are pushing the limits as macroscopic entangled objects could provide us with incredible technologies.

Recently two separate teams worked hard on getting entanglement into the macro world. Both experiments involved freezing their experiment very close to absolute zero. A team from the Dutch Technische Universiteit Delft managed to entangle silicone micro-oscillators on a silicon chip. Just for a split second but it was enough. Each micro-oscillator had about 8 billion atoms.

The second team from the Finnish Aalto-yliopisto University used miniature mechanical drums made from a vibrating aluminum membrane. The membrane is about 15 micrometers wide which in layman's terms in about a thin human hair. They used microwaves on the drums and then watch their quantum states. In the end, they managed to prove that the drums are entangled and could potentially be kept entangled as long as they are being affected by the microwaves.

Quantum entanglement has many potential uses in the real world. For example, the micro-oscillators were intentionally vibrating in a way that would be compatible with existing telecommunication systems. Thus they could one day become the key towards a quantum-based internet. Or the micro-drums are good for really precise measurements making them potentially ideal for ultra-precise measurements of space-time vibrations, like detecting gravitational waves.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0036-z
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04827-5
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0038-x
• http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-04-26/quantum-physics-entanglement-shown-massive-objects-first-time/9687076