Pretty much everybody knows the name Albert Einstein and anyone who pays attention to science knows that his theories on gravitational waves was confirmed back in February at LIGO. This was a massive discovery, and many are calling it a shoe in for a Nobel Prize. But despite the slow-down in recent breakthroughs in physics, gravity waves might be getting some competition pretty soon from one of Einstein’s other brainchildren, quantum entanglement.
When two objects, generally just particles, are “quantum entangled,” their states are independent of each other; this means that everything that happens to one object happens to the other, at the same time, no matter how far apart they are. This “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein calls it, has been debated quite frequently by quantum physicists. Despite the lack of papers published on the subject, there have been two promising studies as of late.
In 2011, researchers at Oxford were able to entangle two very small diamonds (3 mm2 by 1 mm thick) a half foot apart. After exposing the diamonds to a laser for a very small amount of time, they were able to record a photon hitting one diamond as causing the second diamond to experience the hit as well. This is the largest example of quantum entanglement, and it bodes well for future application.
More recently, there was a paper submitted by Delft University in 2015 that claims to have closed what are known as the detection and communication loopholes. The detection loophole is when not all of the data emitted is detected. The communication loophole is when the points are close enough that due to relativity, the speed of light boundary is not broken. They defeated both loopholes by entangling distant electrons to photons then sending the photons at each other, entangling them; this, in turn, entangled the electrons. This experiment is a huge milestone in the viability of entanglement, and many people predict that these researchers will win a Nobel Prize.
These results may not seem very meaningful, but they are extremely promising to fields like computer science and security. Since quantum entanglement is instantaneous, it allows us to transfer information faster than the speed of light and allows for the possibility of machines that can perform operations instantaneously. Imagine a computer that never has loading screens, YouTube that doesn’t buffer, databases that can be searched in 0 seconds, or even a rover on mars that doesn't have a 30 minute input lag. The potential is literally limitless.