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By CALLA COFIELD / SPACE.COM / February 13, 2017, 1:00 PM

600-year-old starlightbolsters Einstein's "spookyaction" theory

A group of scientists has used starlight to test a feature of quantum mechanics thatgave Albert Einstein the creeps.

Entanglement is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s aphenomenon by which one particle can effectively “know” something aboutanother particle instantaneously, even if those two particles are separated by agreat distance. It appears to go against the idea that nothing, not eveninformation, can travel faster than the speed of light.

Scientists who study this phenomenon want to be sure that nothing in theirexperimental setup is somehow creating the illusion of entanglement, perhaps viasome physical mechanism or phenomenon that scientists don’t yet know about. In

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Physicists from MIT, the University of Vienna, and elsewhere have presented a strongdemonstration of quantum entanglement even when vulnerability to the freedom-of-choice loopholeis significantly restricted. / CHRISTINE DANILOFF/MIT

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an effort to close a possible loophole in entanglement experiments, a group ofresearchers used starlight as part of their experiment. The researchers say theresults of their work provide further support for this “spooky” phenomenon.[Quantum Entanglement: Love on a Subatomic Scale]

Universal speed limitIf humans were to discover an intelligent species living on a planet 10 light-yearsaway, it would take 10 years to send them a message that said “hello,” and 10 moreyears for their reply to come back to Earth. If we discovered a civilization on aneven more distant planet, it could take many human lifetimes just to start aconversation.

That’s the law, according to Einstein: nothing can travel faster than the speed oflight, so communications conducted over vast cosmic distances come with aninherent delay.

And yet, there is a feature of quantum mechanics that seems to violate thatprinciple. Quantum mechanics is an area of physics that deals with subatomicparticles. In this seriously small realm, things behave in a way that can seemtotally contradictory to what we experience in the macroscopic world. Onequantum phenomenon called entanglement postulates that pairs of entangledparticles can effectively exchange information instantaneously. In theory, theseparticles could communicate instantly over vast cosmic distances.

This idea rattled Einstein; he never fully accepted it. And even today, scientists areworking to make sure this strange phenomenon is real.

EntanglementOne of the more famous fables in quantum mechanics is about poor Schrödinger’scat, who got stuck in an uncertain state: the feline was neither alive nor dead untilsomeone opened the box to find out. Uncertainty is another one of the truly freakyfeatures of quantum mechanics. In the real world, something can either be alive ordead; in the quantum world, there’s a third option in which the object’s statehasn’t yet been determined. To break the uncertainty, someone has to measure it(open the box) and force the object (cat) into one state (alive/dead).

Entangled particles also exist, initially, in an uncertain state. Particles can’t bealive or dead, so instead think heads and tails. If you flip a coin 100 times, oddsare it will come up heads close to 50 times and tails close to 50 times. If I then flipmy own coin 100 times, there’s a high probability the split will also be close to50/50. But if our coins are entangled, then the outcome of your flip determines theoutcome of my flip — perhaps our entanglement is such that every time you flipheads I flip tails. If we flip our coins enough times, our entanglement will begin tobecome obvious, because my outcome of my flip is no longer random, butdetermined by your flip, and the odds of my flipping tails every time you flip headsget lower and lower the more we flip.

That’s sort of how scientistscan measure entanglement.Instead of flipping a pair ofcoins over and over again,researchers measure theproperties in many, many ofpairs of entangled particles(entanglement can only bemeasured in a pair ofparticles once). But thescientists have to be sure

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that what they’re seeing isn’tjust random chance.

A statement from theMassachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) poses the question, “What if there were some other factors orhidden variables correlated with the experimental setup, making the resultsappear to be quantumly entangled, when in fact they were the result of somenonquantum mechanism?”

In other words, how can scientists be sure there’s not some unseen factor affectingtheir experiments, and making it seem as though the examined particles areentangled, when in fact they are not?

A physicist named John Bell showed that if entanglement exists, then there mustbe a minimum degree of correlation between entangled particles when scientistsmeasure them; this is known as Bell’s inequality or Bell’s theorem.

In some entanglement experiments, the detector measures a property of lightparticles called polarity; the detector must be oriented in one of two directions,and only photons polarized in the same direction (one of two possibilities) canpass through. In order to make sure that the detector is not somehow influencedby one of those mysterious forces that could corrupt the experiment, researcherswill use random-number generators to determine the direction of the detector.

That random choice is made “in the split second between when the photon leavesthe source and arrives at the detector,” according to the MIT statement. “But thereis a chance, however slight, that hidden variables, or nonquantum influences, mayaffect a random number generator before it relays its split-second decision to thephoton detector,” the statement said.

This particular “loophole” in an experiment testing Bell’s inequality is known asthe “freedom-of-choice loophole.” In 2014, a couple of scientists got togetherand came up with a new idea for how to avoid those possible influences, usingstarlight as the thing that randomly determines the direction of the detector. Now,those researchers have put their idea to the test. [How Quantum EntanglementWorks (Infographic)]

“At the heart of quantum entanglement is the high degree of correlations in theoutcomes of measurements on these pairs [of particles],” David Kaiser, professorof physics at MIT and co-author on the study, said in the statement. “But what if askeptic or critic insisted these correlations weren’t due to these particles acting ina fully quantum mechanical way? We want to address whether there is any otherway that those correlations could have snuck in without our having noticed.”

Measuring starlightEvery photon of starlight that reaches a telescope has a particular wavelength. Inthe new study, which was conducted in Vienna, Austria, the researchers set up acouple of telescopes and started collecting photons (the telescopes and detectorswere placed on rooftops at the university, as well as the roof of the AustrianNational Bank). They selected a reference wavelength, and each photon that hitthe telescope would either have a longer or shorter wavelength than that referencepoint. A photon with a longer wavelength switched the detector to one orientation,and a shorter wavelength switched it to the other orientation.

“With bright stars like these, the number of photons coming in can be like afirehose,” Andrew Friedman, an MIT research associate and co-author on the newstudy, said in the statement. “So we have these very fast detectors that can registerdetections of cosmic photons on subnanosecond timescales.”

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Gravitational waves detected again, provingEinstein right

The researchers measured about 100,000 pairs of entangled photons with thismethod, and their results suggested that the particles were truly entangled.

The most distant stars usedin the experiment are about600 light-years away, whichmeans the photons wereemitted 600 years ago. Ifthose photons weresomehow tied to the state ofthe entangled photons, thatconnection would have tohave been established 600years ago, according to thestatement.

“This experiment pushesback the latest time at whichthe conspiracy could have

started,” Alan Guth, a professor of physics at MIT and another co-author on thenew study, said in the statement. “We’re saying, in order for some crazymechanism to simulate quantum mechanics in our experiment, that mechanismhad to have been in place 600 years ago to plan for our doing the experiment heretoday, and to have sent photons of just the right messages to end up reproducingthe results of quantum mechanics. So it’s very far-fetched.”

The study doesn’t fully eliminate the possibility of some mysterious force acting onthe experiment, but it certainly puts tighter restrictions on how and when such athing could happen.

“The real estate left over for the skeptics of quantum mechanics has shrunkconsiderably,” Kaiser said. “We haven’t gotten rid of it, but we’ve shrunk it downby 16 orders of magnitude.”

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Followus @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Editor’s RecommendationsWhy Can’t Quantum Mechanics Explain Gravity? (Op-Ed)Quantum Entanglement Test On Space Station May Be Tried | VideoEinstein’s Unfinished Dream: Marrying Relativity to the Quantum World

Space.com. All rights reserved.

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