A groundbreaking study from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology unveils a newly discovered form of quantum entanglement in the total angular momentum of photons confined in nanoscale structures – just a thousandth the width of a human hair. This discovery could play a key role in the future miniaturization of quantum communication and computing components

The study, published in Nature, was led by Ph.D. student Amit Kam and Dr. Shai Tsesses (now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT) from Prof. Guy Bartal’s research group, in collaboration with the groups of Distinguished Prof. Moti Segev and Prof. Meir Orenstein. Additional contributors include Dr. Yigal Ilin, Dr. Kobi Cohen, Lior Fridman, Stav Lotan (Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering), Dr. Yaakov Lumer, Dr. Anatoly (Tolik) Patsyk, and Liat Nemirovsky-Levy (Faculty of Physics).

Quantum physics sometimes leads to very unconventional predictions. This is what happened when Albert Einstein and his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (who later founded the Faculty of Physics at the Technion), found a scenario in which knowing the state of one particle immediately affects the state of the other particle, no matter how great the distance between them. Their historic 1935 paper was nicknamed EPR after its three authors (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen).

The idea that knowing the state of one particle will affect another particle located at a huge distance from it, without physical interaction and information transfer, seemed absurd to Einstein, who called it “spooky action at a distance.” But groundbreaking work by another Technion researcher, Research Prof. Asher Peres from the Faculty of Physics, showed that this property can be used to transmit information in a hidden way – quantum teleportation, which is the basis for quantum communication. This discovery was made by Prof. Peres with his colleagues Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard.

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