Top antitop quark event
“Spooky action” is a famous phrase coined by Albert Einstein to express his discomfort with quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics in which two or more particles become bound so that their quantum states are interconnected, no matter how far apart they are in space.
When two particles are entangled, the state of one particle is directly related to the state of the other. For example, if you measure the spin of one particle, you instantly know the spin of the other particle, even if it is light years away. The “spooky” part refers to the fact that these particles seem to communicate instantly. If you make a measurement on a particle, the result of the measurement on its entangled partner is correlated in a way that defies the classical understanding of space and time. This phenomenon seems to violate the principle of locality, which states that objects cannot be influenced instantaneously by objects that are distant (nothing can travel faster than the speed of light). However, quantum entanglement does not involve the transfer of information in the traditional sense, so it does not directly contradict relativity.
John Bell formulated a theorem in the 1960s that encompasses a number of closely related results in physics, all of which state that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local theories with hidden variables, given some basic assumptions about the nature of measurement. Experimental tests, such as those of Alain Aspect in the 1980s, have consistently supported quantum mechanics and the reality of entanglement over hidden variables.
In short, “spooky action” refers to the non-intuitive, non-local connection between entangled particles, which seems to defy classical physics, but is a well-documented and fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics.
Despite Einstein’s discomfort about the concept, quantum entanglement has been experimentally verified many times and is the foundation for technologies such as quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and the development of quantum computers. Quantum entanglement has been observed in a wide variety of systems and length scales, ranging from microscopic to macroscopic, but remains largely unexplored at the highest accessible energy scales.
A team of scientists at ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), the largest collider at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, reported on September 18 the highest energy observed to date in top-antitop quark events produced at the LHC, using a proton-proton collision data set. ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle collider experiment at the LHC, designed to observe phenomena involving extremely massive particles that were not observable using earlier, by lower-energy accelerators. The results were published in Nature.
”While particle physics is deeply rooted in quantum mechanics, the observation of quantum entanglement in a new particle system and at much higher energy than previously possible is remarkable,” said Andreas Hoecker, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment. in a statement, according to LiveScience. “It paves the way for new investigations into this fascinating phenomenon, opening up a rich menu of exploration as our data samples continue to grow.”
Colliders act on fundamental particles and their interactions at the highest energies accessible in a laboratory, surpassed only by astrophysical sources. Hadron colliders provide a truly relativistic environment and provide a rich variety of fundamental interactions rarely considered for quantum information experiments.
The raw data were generated by the ATLAS experiment. Derived data supporting the conclusions of this study are available from the ATLAS Collaboration upon request. ATLAS data reduction software is available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4772550). Modeling and statistical analysis are based on the ROOT software and its built-in RooFit and RooStats modules, available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3895852). Code for configuring these statistical tools and processing their results is available upon request.
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