Physicists have spent more than a century measuring and making sense of the strange ways that photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles interact at extremely small scales. Engineers have spent decades figuring out how to take advantage of these phenomena to create new technologies.
In one such phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, pairs of photons become interconnected in such a way that the state of one photon instantly changes to match the state of its paired photon, no matter how far apart they are.
Nearly 80 years ago, Albert Einstein referred to this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Today, entanglement is the subject of research programs across the world—and it’s becoming a favored way to implement the most fundamental form of quantum information, the qubit.
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