Scientists Produced a Particle of Light That Simultaneously Accessed 37 Different Dimensions

Classical and quantum mechanics don’t really get along as the science of the subatomic can get, well, weird. Take, for instance, quantum entanglement, which says that the state of one particle can be determined by examining the state of its entangled pair regardless of distance. This strange fact flies in the face of classical physics, and even led Albert Einstein to famously describe this quantum quirk as “spooky action at a distance.”

This is what is known as “quantum nonlocality,” where objects are influenced across distances (seeming beyond the speed of light) whereas classical physics follows local theory, the idea that objects are influenced by their immediate surroundings. This is a pretty sharp divide as explained by the famous no-go theorem known as the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) paradox, which essentially details how quantum theory cannot be described by local realistic description.

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Named for the physicists who described the paradox in 1989, GHZ-type paradoxes show that when particles can only be influenced by proximity they produce mathematical impossibilities. As New Scientist reports, the paradox can even be expressed through a calculation where 1 equals -1. This paradox is useful in showing how quantum properties can not be described using classical means, but a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, decided to see just how strange these paradoxes could get.

Essentially, an international team of scientists wanted to see how un-classical particles of light could get—and the results were maybe stranger than the authors originally anticipated. This extremely technical experiment produced photons, or particles of light, that existed in 37 dimensions. Just as you and I exist in three dimension—plus an additional temporal dimension—these photons required 37 similar reference points.

“This experiment shows that quantum physics is more nonclassical than many of us thought,” Technical University of Denmark’s Zhenghao Liu, a co-author of the study, told New Scientist. “It could be [that] 100 years after its discovery, we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

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Pulling this off is not an easy thing to do as Liu and his team needed to feed a version of the GHZ paradox into coherent light—even in color and wavelength—so that they could easily manipulate the photons. This essentially resulted in the most “nonclassical effects in the quantum world” that’s ever been created, Liu told New Scientist.

“We believe that this work has opened several avenues for future research,” the authors write. “We hope our findings can be used to build even stronger quantum advantages in high-dimensional systems.”

In other words, if we’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg, just imagine what quantum breakthroughs are lurking just below the surface.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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