Australian-US collaboration leaps ahead in catching spooky light

Experiments with entangled photons have led the way in the burgeoning fields of quantum information, communication and computation in the last decade.

Their biggest drawback has always been low photon-detection efficiencies, which has limited their potential applications.

Now, a joint experiment by Australian and US labs has fixed this problem, doubling the previous record in entangled photon detection ratio to 62 per cent, and closing the detection “loophole” in the strange phenomenon of quantum steering.