CERN ’s ATLAS experiment has assess the quantum entanglement of top quark , the most massive fundamental particles , at the highest energy yet , 12 Order of magnitudes ( one trillion times ) high than stock entanglement experiments .

Quantum entanglement is a property that we do not experience at our tier of reality . It is very much in the knowledge base of the smallest player in the universe . When molecule are entangled , they can only be realize as part of a single state and not as someone any longer . So if something sham one , the other will be instantaneously affected , even if it was on the other side of the universe . This might seem a violation of special theory of relativity and the finiteness of the pep pill of luminosity but it is n’t , although Einstein was very bothered by it and cry it “ spooky action at a length . ”

But it ’s not spooky , it ’s actually a very utile quality that underpins the future ofquantum computersand communications , though for sure not at the muscularity reach at CERN . Some of the top quarks create in speck collisions form in pairs that are entangled and it is these that theATLAS experimenthas been canvas , using data collected between 2015 and 2018 .

Top quarksare very weird . They are fundamental particles , like a heavy cousin of the up quark found inside proton and neutrons , the particle that make up all the atoms in existence . They are so heavy that they have the same multitude as a caffeine corpuscle . But you would n’t get a beef from the top quark . It is unstable and disintegrate too speedily . It disappears in 5×10−25seconds .

That time frame is incredibly small-scale . That separation is to one second like one second is to 100 million times the historic period of the cosmos . That is so short that it ca n’t decay into particles made of quarks ( the so - call hadrons ) and allow physicist to try indirectly many properties of the stock model of particle physics , such as the masses of theHiggs boson .

All of those tests are done by see at the decay product , the particles that are create in the backwash of the top - quark pairs coming into existence . The team managed to measure a level of entanglement that could not be explained if the quarks were not mat , with a precision that outperform the favourable standard for particle physics .

The results were presented at theATLAS conferenceon September 28 .