What is Quantum entanglement?

• IAS NEXT, Lucknow
• 03, Jan 2022

Reference News:

Scientists have identified the first ”quantum entangled” animal in history-frozen tardigrade, in a recent study.

• Frozen tardigrade are microscopic multicellular organisms known to tolerate extreme physiochemical conditions through a latent state of life known as cryptobiosis.

Cryptobiosis:

Also known as anabiosis, it is a metabolic state of life entered by an organism in response to adverse environmental conditions such as desiccation, freezing, and oxygen deficiency.

• In the cryptobiotic state, all measurable metabolic processes stop, preventing reproduction, development, and repair.
• When environmental conditions return to being hospitable, the organism will return to its metabolic state of life as it was prior to the cryptobiosis.

About the study:

• The researchers managed the feat by placing frozen tardigrades between two capacitor plates of a superconductor circuit to form a qubit, the quantum equivalent of a bit.
• Upon contact, they say, the tardigrade changed the qubit’s frequency.
• They then placed this circuit in the vicinity of a second superconductor circuit. Lo and behold, the team observed that the frequency of both qubits and the tardigrade changed in tandem.

Quantum Entanglement:

It is the physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles is generated and they interact in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others.

• In this quantum mechanical phenomenon, the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.
• This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems.
• Albert Einstein dismissed this idea as a ‘spooky action’.

Significance:

Quantum entanglement is one of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics, which makes phenomena such as quantum teleportation and super-dense coding possible.