How Do You Create Quantum Entanglement?

forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2017/02/28/how-do-you-create-quantum-entanglement

February 28, 2017

One morning last week, I arrived on campus at the same time as a colleague from the
History department who studies the history of physics. As we were walking toward the
center of campus from the parking lot, he asked the title question of this post: "How do
you create quantum entanglement?" He noted that he'd read a lot of pop-science articles
talking about the weird aspects of the physics that happens once you have two entangled
particles, but they tended to skip lightly over the details of how you get them entangled in
the first place.

We had a nice conversation about it as we walked, and I filed that away as a topic for a
blog post. I figured if my colleague was confused about that, then a bunch of other people
probably are, too. And while I have certainly written a lot about entanglement here (The
first page of Google results for "orzel forbes entanglement" gives one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine links, and that's not all of them), it's also true that I haven't
gone into that much detail about the creation of entanglement. Which turns out to be
easier than you might think from pop-physics treatments that emphasize its weirdness,
and that's an excellent excuse for a blog post.

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/DbbWx2COU0E

Before we do that, though, it's important to set the basic parameters of what we mean by
"quantum entanglement." The central idea is very simple: You have two particles, each of
which can be in one of two states, and put them in a state where their states are
indeterminate, but correlated. If you measure them individually, you get a random
distribution of "0" and "1" answers, but if you repeat the measurements many times for

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many identically prepared pairs, you find that the resulting lists of "0" and "1"
measurements are identical. The state of one of the two particles depends on the state of
the other, and that correlation will hold even when they're separated.

Now, here's a brief description of four ways you can take two objects and put them in this
kind of entangled quantum state:

Schematic of the third Aspect experiment testing quantum non-locality. Entangled photons from the...
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1) Entanglement From Birth: The vast majority of quantum entanglement

experiments to date use photons as the entangled particles, for the simple reason that it's
really easy to entangle two photons. And most of the ways people have to entangle
photons just give you an entangled state right from the get-go.

The historical way of doing this is to use a "cascade" transition, as was done by Alain
Aspect and colleagues in a classic set of experiments back in the early 1980s, and by
Freedman and Clauser somewhat earlier. In these experiments, they put a bunch of
calcium atoms into a highly-excited energy level where the electron is forbidden to return
to the ground state by emitting a single photon. Instead, they decay by emitting two
photons, passing through an intermediate state with a short lifetime. The emission of one
photon is followed within a few nanoseconds by the emission of the second, so if you see
one, you know the other should be around somewhere. And while these photons are
emitted in random directions, when it happens that they're emitted in opposite directions,
then conservation of angular requires that their polarizations have to be correlated with
each other: that is, they need to be in an entangled state.

Cascade sources work, but they're pretty slow because each atom shoots photons out in
random directions, so getting two photons sent in the right directions to hit your detectors
can take a while. The quantum-entanglement business was revolutionized by the
development of "parametric downconversion" sources, which use non-linear optical
crystals to convert single high-energy photons into pairs of photons with half the initial
energy. A violet laser shining into one of these crystals (the most common material used is
"beta barium borate" or "BBO") will produce a small number of pairs of near-infrared
photons. There's still a bit of randomness to the process, but conservation of momentum
requires that the pairs come out on opposite sides of a cone around the original laser

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beam, allowing you to put two detectors in exactly the right place to catch the photons.
And with the proper arrangement of the crystal (actually two thin crystals stuck together
in the right way), the polarizations of the two photons will be correlated in exactly the way
you need to demonstrate entanglement.

These parametric downconversion sources get you a much higher count rate, allowing the
experiments to achieve truly ridiculous levels of statistical significance. The basic system
is also simple enough to be an undergraduate lab experiment; we've had several students
in recent years do their senior theses on parametric downconversion (not with
entanglement, yet, but I have some summer students lined up to work on that). These are
also the key sources for experiments on quantum teleportation, and many quantum
information experiments. If you read a news story whose headline makes reference to
Einstein's derisive description of entanglement, "spooky interaction at a distance," there's
probably about a 75% chance it describes experiments that use parametric
downconversion in some way.

2) Second-Generation Entanglement. Photons are great for demonstrating

entanglement and transmitting information, but the world isn't just photons, and they
have some significant disadvantages. Chief among them that they're kind of hard to keep
around, since by definition they're always moving somewhere at the speed of light. For a
lot of purposes, it would be nicer to entangle material particles instead, because they're
easier to hold on to for long periods of time.

One of the simplest ways to imagine doing this is to just take a pair of photons that are
produced in an entangled state, and direct them at, say, a pair of atoms that can absorb
the photons in question. The end state of the photon absorption will depend on the
polarization of the photons, so since the polarizations are indeterminate-but-correlated,
you will end up with two atoms whose states are indeterminate-but-correlated.

In practice, this is kind of tricky, since the sorts of entangled photons you can generate
easily don't connect readily to atomic states that last a long time. If you're clever, though,
you can find ways to do this kind of thing, and convert entanglement of photons into
entanglement of the atoms that absorb those photons.

3) Entanglement By Accident. This method is a clever trick that sort of turns the
previous method inside-out. That is, it starts with a pair of atoms at different locations
that emit photons. Bringing the photons together in the right way can entangle the states
of the two photons, in a way that leads to entanglement of the original atoms.

I first learned about this in experiments by Chris Monroe's group at Maryland (link to a
write-up on my other blog), where they used ytterbium ions held in separate ion traps.
The ions were excited to a state from which they could decay in one of two ways, emitting
a photon with one of two polarizations. They collect the emitted photons, and bring them
together on a beamsplitter, with two photodetectors placed at the two outputs of the
beamsplitter.

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In this configuration, about 25% of the time they get two photons reaching the
beamsplitter, they'll detect one photon at each output. From quantum optics, we know
that when this happens the two photons had opposite polarizations, meaning that the two
ions have ended up in two different states. But they have no way of knowing which ion
emitted which photon. Thus, the two ions end up entangled: if you measure the individual
states, you get random results, but if you compare the lists of results for each ion over
many repetitions, you find that they're perfectly correlated.

This is inherently probabilistic, and the original experiments in 2009(-ish) were very
slow. They've done some refinements of the basic scheme, but it's still not as convenient a
source of entangled pairs as you get with parametric downconversion. It is, however, an
exceptionally cool trick, because the two ions are never anywhere close to each other --
they're trapped in entirely separate vacuum chambers, on different parts of the laser table.
The only thing that's brought together is the light they emitted, but that's enough to
entangle the ions, with all the weird results that follow from that.

Schematic of the Rydberg blockade scheme. Left: two ground-state atoms don't affect each other, and...
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4) Entanglement By Interaction. The coolest bit of the previous method -- that the
ions are always separated -- points toward the final method of generating entanglement,
which is just to bring the two together and let them interact in such a way that the final
states of the two particles depend on each other. That is, after all, the essential meaning of
what an entangled state is.

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There are a bunch of ways of doing this, mostly associated with different quantum
computing schemes, but it might be easiest to picture using a "Rydberg blockade" scheme.
The idea here is that if you have two ground-state atoms separated by a smallish distance,
they don't affect each other, but if you excite those atoms to a very high-energy state (a
"Rydberg state" in atomic physics jargon), they interact over longer ranges, and can thus
shift each others' energy levels.

If you arrange things properly, exciting one atom to the Rydberg state will shift the energy
levels of the other by enough that it can't be excited by the same laser. So, you use a laser
pulse to put one in a superposition of the ground state and the Rydberg state, then try to
excite the second atom, it ends up in a superposition that's perfectly anti-correlated with
the first atom: the part of the first atom that's in the ground state is paired with the part of
the second atom that's in the Rydberg level, and vice versa. In other words, the two atoms
are now entangled.

This is a simple example of an interaction that leads to indeterminate-but-correlated final

states, but it gets the key idea across. Any time you can bring two systems together in such
a way that the final state of one particle depends on the input state of the other, you can
make an entangled state by making that input state a quantum superposition. This will
necessarily lead to a pair of particles each of which is in an indeterminate state, with any
eventual measurements of those states being perfectly correlated (or anti-correlated). It's
a powerful idea, and central to pretty much every quantum computing scheme.

It's worth noting, here, that all of these schemes have a common feature, namely that the
entanglement is created in a local manner. That is, the schemes either involve entangled
particles that are in the same place at some point (entangled photons come from the same
atom or input photon, and the interacting atoms are necessarily close together), or they
interact via something passing between them at no more than light speed (an entangled
photon pair traveling out to separate atoms, or the photons from two ions traveling to a
beamsplitter). This is a critical feature for keeping the weirdness of entanglement
contained -- you can't just arbitrarily entangle two particles that have no common history,
which rules out most attempts to justify paranormal phenomena by invoking quantum
entanglement.

These methods for generating entanglement are very general, and there are numerous
technical details of implementing them with specific systems that I'm skipping over.
These should help get the general ideas across, though, so the next time you read a pop-
science article about quantum entanglement, you'll have a better idea of just where that
comes from.

I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College,
and I write books about science for non-scientists. I have a BA in physics from

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