Physicists from the National Laboratory at Brookhaven (Brookhaven National Laboratory, BNL) have discovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement, a well-known phenomenon that connects quantum particles. And this new type of entanglement has already been practically used during experiments to study the processes and events occurring in atomic nuclei at the collider.

We remind our readers that under certain conditions, two particles can achieve an invisible connection that connects them at any distance, which can theoretically be infinitely larger. A change in the quantum state of one of the particles will cause an abrupt change in the state of the second entangled particle. Quantum entanglement is impossible from the point of view of classical physics, and even Albert Einstein called it the “distant phantom effect”. However, despite everything, quantum entanglement has been used in various experiments for several decades, it is the basis of quantum computing technologies and communication studies.

Typically, experiments with quantum entanglement use photon pairs, electrons, or another particle of the same type. What makes the BNL scientists’ discovery stand out is that they found two different types of directly entangled particles.

The discovery was made using RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), which studies the forms of matter that existed in the early universe. To do this, the gold ions are accelerated and collide with each other inside the RHIC collider. But the scientists discovered that even when the ions don’t bump into each other, there is something very interesting from which some scientific data can be gathered.

The accelerated gold ions in the collider are surrounded by small clouds of photons, and when the two photons pass each other, the photons of the first ion begin to reflect elements of the internal structure of the second ion. At the same time, reflection occurs with such a high level of detail that the only explanation may be the effect of an entirely new form of quantum entanglement.

Photons interact with the elementary particles of the nucleus of each ion, resulting in a cascade of secondary particles, the last of which is two particles, one with a negative charge and the other with a positively charged peony. Just as some particles in the quantum world can be described as waves, two or more positive peony waves add up and negative peony waves add up. As a result, one of the positive peony and the negative peony that falls within the sensitivity range of the sensor has only one but powerful wave function.

Analysis of the data obtained shows that in each of the pairs positive and negative peonies are mixed with each other. If this were not the case, the wave functions recorded by the sensors would be random and noisy. And so this case is the first case of observation of direct quantum entanglement of two different particles.

“The peonies we studied are similar in many ways, but they are carriers of opposite electric charge, that is, different particles,” the researchers write. That is the nature of differences”.

This discovery, first of all, greatly expands our understanding of quantum mechanics and mysterious quantum phenomena. Second, a new type of quantum entanglement could underlie a host of new technologies, similar to the way BNL scientists study the internal structure of a gold atom’s nucleus.