The rise of artificial intelligence has reshaped the way we all work—and that includes quantum physicists.
In a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists from Nanjing University in China and the Max Planck Institute in Germany detail how they stumbled across a simpler method for achieving quantum entanglement—that strange quantum mechanical quirk Albert Einstein once poetically referred to as “spooky action at distance.” Seemingly connecting particles (even across vast distances) so that one cannot be independently described without the other, quantum entanglement forms “the basis for research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and for practical applications such as quantum networks,” the authors wrote.
Because of this, it would be incredibly helpful to find ways to create entanglement easily—especially as the current method involves forming two separate entangled pairs, performing a Bell-state measurement, collapsing the quantum system, and finally leaving two entanglement photons (a process known as ‘quantum swapping’).
In this new paper, researchers describe how they were using an AI tool called PyTheus—which was built for designing quantum experiments—to reproduce this well-known method for creating entanglement when it instead found a simpler method.
“As a first task, we aimed to rediscover entanglement swapping, one of the most crucial protocols in quantum networks,” Mario Krenn from the Max Planck Institute’s wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Curiously, the algorithm kept producing something else—something simpler—which we initially thought was incorrect. While investigating, we realized that PyTheus’s solution can entangle two distant particles without starting with entanglement, without Bell state projections, and even without measuring all ancillary photons.”
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