Quantum Spookiness Goes Long-distance

摘要

Using two villages on opposite sides of Geneva as their lab, Swiss physicists have taken one of the strangest phenomena of quantum mechanics to a new level. From Geneva they sent a pair of photons along fiber-optic cables, one to each village. When they measured one photon upon its arrival, the other changed instantaneously -though it was 11 miles away. This weird linkage, called quantum entanglement, raises exotic possibilities like teleporta-tion. When two particles are entangled, the measurement of one immediately affects the other, no matter how distant. It's so counterintuitive that Albert Einstein dismissed it as "spooky action at a distance." Such entanglement had been observed before, but never over such a great distance.