Physics News of the Day

i-8b51d976bb10e151da81b2feec4e7a05-sm_PhotonicCat.jpgA couple of quick stories off Physics Web:

First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to "entangle" six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled photons, and is interesting mostly because it's getting to the system size where you can start thinking about using these entangled photons to transmit quantum information and do quantum error correction.

There's also a lovely "artist's conception" picture, reproduced at left, of, um... pink photons connected by springs, flying through the Matrix. I'm not sure what that is, actually, but it's artistic and conceptual.

The other news story of the day is a short article about the University of Washington gravity measurements that we discussed earlier. There's a little more discussion of how the measurement limits interesting cosmological quantities, and some quotes from the experimenters.

This also comes with a nice picture, but it doesn't scale down well.

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Just trying to understand this: does the ability to create larger "cat states" than before have application to quantum computing?