Free Republic

“Harnessing the mysterious property that Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ is a crucial step toward exploiting quantum quirks for technology such as new kinds of sensors or computers,” the physicists said. “Entanglement is not just some academic curiosity; it’s also something you can harness as a basis for doing useful things with quantum mechanics,” Professor Clerk added. Entangled states are typically extremely fragile — especially so when they involve large objects. So Professor Clerk and his colleague, Dr. Matt Woolley from the University of New South Wales, developed a theoretical proposal for how to keep the motion...

The knots in question, the researchers wrote in their paper, were visible enough in images of the light wave data for them to identify the figure eights and toruses. ... To create the knots, the researchers carefully tuned the up-and-down and side-to-side wave motion (the polarization) of two beams of light, partly using technology not unlike that found in polarized sunglasses. The knots formed around "polarization singularities" where the beams intersected, places where the side-to-side and up-and-down wavelengths were exactly equal, and a number of other wavelengths of light looped around them. At those points, light bent in the way...