What Is Quantum Entanglement?

Two quantum systems are entangled when their joint state cannot be written as a tensor product of individual states. A measurement on one system instantly determines the conditional state of the other, even if they are spatially separated.

The phenomenon was sharpened by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (1935) as the EPR paradox, formalised by Bell (1964) into testable inequalities, and confirmed experimentally by Aspect (1982) and many groups since — including the 2022 Nobel Prize for Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger.

Crucially, entanglement does not allow faster-than-light signalling: the marginal distribution of outcomes at one site is unaffected by what is done at the other (no-signalling theorem). It does enable quantum teleportation, dense coding, device-independent QKD, and the speed-ups of quantum algorithms.

Recent research on this topic from arXiv

Preprints and papers indexed on arXiv.org. Links open the public abstract pages.

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