Physics

Stealthy communication just got more secure, thanks to quantum entanglement.

Quantum physics provides a way to share secret information that’s mathematically proven to be safe from the prying eyes of spies. But until now, demonstrations of the technique, called quantum key distribution, rested on an assumption: The devices used to create and measure quantum particles have to be known to be flawless. Hidden defects could allow a stealthy snoop to penetrate the security unnoticed.

Now, three teams of researchers have demonstrated the ability to perform secure quantum communication without prior confirmation that the devices are foolproof. Called device-independent quantum key distribution, the method is based on quantum entanglement, a mysterious relationship between particles that links their properties even when separated over long distances.

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In everyday communication, such as the transmission of credit card numbers over the internet, a secret code, or key, is used to garble the information, so that it can be read only by someone else with the key. But there’s a quandary: How can a distant sender and receiver share that key with one another while ensuring that no one else has intercepted it along the way?

Quantum physics provides a way to share keys by transmitting a series of quantum particles, such as particles of light called photons, and performing measurements on them. By comparing notes, the users can be sure that no one else has intercepted the key. Those secret keys, once established, can then be used to encrypt the sensitive intel (SN: 12/13/17). By comparison, standard internet security rests on a relatively shaky foundation of math problems that are difficult for today’s computers to solve, which could be vulnerable to new technology, namely quantum computers (SN: 6/29/17).

But quantum communication typically has a catch. “There cannot be any glitch that is unforeseen,” says quantum physicist Valerio Scarani of the National University of Singapore. For example, he says, imagine that your device is supposed to emit one photon but unknown to you, it emits two photons. Any such flaws would mean that the mathematical proof of security no longer holds up. A hacker could sniff out your secret key, even though the transmission seems secure.

Device-independent quantum key distribution can rule out such flaws. The method builds off of a quantum technique known as a Bell test, which involves measurements of entangled particles. Such tests can prove that quantum mechanics really does have “spooky” properties, namely nonlocality, the idea that measurements of one particle can be correlated with those of a distant particle. In 2015, researchers performed the first “loophole-free” Bell tests, which certified beyond a doubt that quantum physics’ counterintuitive nature is real (SN: 12/15/15).

“The Bell test basically acts as a guarantee,” says Jean-Daniel Bancal of CEA Saclay in France. A faulty device would fail the test, so “we can infer that the device is working properly.”

In their study, Bancal and colleagues used entangled, electrically charged strontium atoms separated by about two meters. Measurements of those ions certified that their devices were behaving properly, and the researchers generated a secret key, the team reports in the July 28 Nature.

Typically, quantum communication is meant for long-distance dispatches. (To share a secret with someone two meters away, it would be easier to simply walk across the room.) So Scarani and colleagues studied entangled rubidium atoms 400 meters apart. The setup had what it took to produce a secret key, the researchers report in the same issue of Nature. But the team didn’t follow the process all the way through: The extra distance meant that producing a key would have taken months.

In the third study, published in the July 29 Physical Review Letters, researchers wrangled entangled photons rather than atoms or ions. Physicist Wen-Zhao Liu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and colleagues also demonstrated the capability to generate keys, at distances up to 220 meters. This is particularly challenging to do with photons, Liu says, because photons are often lost in the process of transmission and detection.

Loophole-free Bell tests are already no easy feat, and these techniques are even more challenging, says physicist Krister Shalm of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. “The requirements for this experiment are so absurdly high that it’s just an impressive achievement to be able to demonstrate some of these capabilities,” says Shalm, who wrote a perspective in the same issue of Nature.

That means that the technique won’t see practical use anytime soon, says physicist Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, who was not involved with the research.

Still, device-independent quantum key distribution is “a totally fascinating idea,” Gisin says. Bell tests were designed to answer a philosophical question about the nature of reality — whether quantum physics really is as weird as it seems. “To see that this now becomes a tool that enables something else,” he says, “this is the beauty.” More

Machine learning can get a boost from quantum physics.

On certain types of machine learning tasks, quantum computers have an exponential advantage over standard computation, scientists report in the June 10 Science. The researchers proved that, according to quantum math, the advantage applies when using machine learning to understand quantum systems. And the team showed that the advantage holds up in real-world tests.

“People are very excited about the potential of using quantum technology to improve our learning ability,” says theoretical physicist and computer scientist Hsin-Yuan Huang of Caltech. But it wasn’t entirely clear if machine learning could benefit from quantum physics in practice.

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In certain machine learning tasks, scientists attempt to glean information about a quantum system — say a molecule or a group of particles — by performing repeated experiments, and analyzing data from those experiments to learn about the system.

Huang and colleagues studied several such tasks. In one, scientists aim to discern properties of the quantum system, such as the position and momentum of particles within. Quantum data from multiple experiments could be input into a quantum computer’s memory, and the computer would process the data jointly to learn the quantum system’s characteristics.

The researchers proved theoretically that doing the same characterization with standard, or classical, techniques would require exponentially more experiments in order to learn the same information. Unlike a classical computer, a quantum computer can exploit entanglement — ethereal quantum linkages — to better analyze the results of multiple experiments.

But the new work goes beyond just the theoretical. “It’s crucial to understand if this is realistic, if this is something we could see in the lab or if this is just theoretical,” says Dorit Aharonov of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was not involved with the research.

So the researchers tested machine learning tasks with Google’s quantum computer, Sycamore (SN: 10/23/19). Rather than measuring a real quantum system, the team used simulated quantum data, and analyzed it using either quantum or classical techniques.

Quantum machine learning won out there, too, even though Google’s quantum computer is noisy, meaning errors can slip into calculations. Eventually, scientists plan to build quantum computers that can correct their own errors (SN: 6/22/20). But for now, even without that error correction, quantum machine learning prevailed. More

The best way to find buried treasure may be with a quantum gravity sensor.

In these devices, free-falling atoms reveal subtle variations in Earth’s gravitational pull at different places. Those variations reflect differences in the density of material beneath the sensor — effectively letting the instrument peer underground. In a new experiment, one of these machines teased out the tiny gravitational signature of an underground tunnel, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Nature.

“Instruments like this would find many, many applications,” says Nicola Poli, an experimental physicist at the University of Florence, who coauthored a commentary on the study in the same issue of Nature.

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Poli imagines using quantum gravity sensors to monitor groundwater or magma beneath volcanoes, or to help archaeologists uncover hidden tombs or other artifacts without having to dig them up (SN: 11/2/17). These devices could also help farmers check soil quality or help engineers inspect potential construction sites for unstable ground.

“There are many tools to measure gravity,” says Xuejian Wu, an atomic physicist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., who wasn’t involved in the study. Some devices measure how far gravity pulls down a mass hanging from a spring. Other tools use lasers to clock how fast an object tumbles down a vacuum chamber. But free-falling atoms, like those in quantum gravity sensors, are the most pristine, reliable test masses out there, Wu says. As a result, quantum sensors promise to be more accurate and stable in the long run than other gravity probes.

Inside a quantum gravity sensor, a cloud of supercooled atoms is dropped down a chute. A pulse of light then splits each of the falling atoms into a superposition state — a quantum limbo where each atom exists in two places at once (SN: 11/7/19). Due to their slightly different positions in Earth’s gravitational field, the two versions of each atom feel a different downward tug as they fall. Another light pulse then recombines the split atoms.

Thanks to the atoms’ wave-particle duality — a strange rule of quantum physics that says atoms can act like waves — the reunited atoms interfere with each other (SN: 1/13/22). That is, as the atom waves overlap, their crests and troughs can reinforce or cancel each other out, creating an interference pattern. That pattern reflects the slightly different downward pulls that the split versions of each atom felt as they fell — revealing the gravity field at the atom cloud’s location.

Extremely precise measurements made by such atom-based devices have helped test Einstein’s theory of gravity (SN: 10/28/20) and measure fundamental constants, such as Newton’s gravitational constant (SN: 4/12/18). But atom-based gravity sensors are highly sensitive to vibrations from seismic activity, traffic and other sources.

“Even very, very small vibrations create enough noise that you have to measure for a long time” at any location to weed out background tremors, says Michael Holynski, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in England. That has made quantum gravity sensing impractical for many uses outside the lab.  

Holynski’s team solved that problem by building a gravity sensor with not one but two falling clouds of rubidium atoms. With one cloud suspended a meter above the other, the instrument could gauge the strength of gravity at two different heights in a single location. Comparing those measurements allowed the researchers to cancel out the effects of background noise.

Holynski and colleagues tested whether their sensor — a 2-meter-tall chute on wheels tethered to a rolling cart of equipment — could detect an underground passageway on the University of Birmingham campus. The 2-by-2-meter concrete tunnel lay beneath a road between two multistory buildings. The quantum sensor measured the local gravitational field every 0.5 meters along an 8.5-meter line that crossed over the tunnel. Those readouts matched the predictions of a computer simulation, which had estimated the gravitational signal of the tunnel based on its structure and other factors that could influence the local gravitational field, such as nearby buildings.

Based on the machine’s sensitivity in this experiment, it could probably provide a reliable gravity measurement at each location in less than two minutes, the researchers estimate. That’s about one-tenth the time needed for other types of gravity sensors.

The team has since built a downsized version of the gravity sensor used in the tunnel-detecting experiment. The new machine weighs about 15 kilograms, compared with the 300-kilogram beast used for the tunnel test. Other upgrades could also boost the gravity sensor’s speed.

In the future, engineer Nicole Metje envisions building a quantum gravity sensor that could be pushed from place to place like a lawn mower. But portability isn’t the only challenge for making these tools more user-friendly, says Metje, a coauthor on the study who is also at the University of Birmingham. “At the moment, we still need someone with a physics degree to operate the sensor.”

So hopeful beachcombers may be waiting a long time to trade in their metal detectors for quantum gravity sensors. More

From Data to QuantaSlobodan PerovićUniv. of Chicago, $45

Ever since Max Planck introduced the idea of the quantum to the world, physicists have argued about whether reality is more like sand or water.

Planck’s famous 1900 discovery that energy is grainy — at least when absorbed or emitted — moved him to label those smallest bits of energy grains “quanta.” But he believed that once emitted, as in light from a fire, those grains merged into smooth, continuous waves, just as water seems a smooth liquid to human perception. Einstein, on the other hand, insisted that light quanta traveled through space on their own, behaving like particles later called photons.

By the mid-1920s, both the wave and particle views of light had gained experimental support, with the additional paradox that electrons — supposedly particles — could sometimes disguise themselves as waves.

Into this arena of controversy stepped the famed Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the pioneer of exploring the architecture of the atom. Bohr announced that resolving the wave-particle paradox required a new view of reality, in which both notions shared a role in explaining experimental phenomena. In experiments designed to observe waves, waves you would find, whether electrons or light. In experiments designed to detect particles, you’d see particles. But in no experiment could you demonstrate both at once. Bohr called this viewpoint the principle of complementarity, and it successfully guided the pursuit of quantum mechanics during the following decades.

More recently, as philosopher Slobodan Perović recounts in From Data to Quanta, Bohr’s success has been questioned by some physicists and philosophers and even popular science writers (SN: 1/19/19, p. 26). Complementarity has been derided as an incoherent application of vague philosophy expressed in incomprehensible language. But as Perović’s investigations reveal, such criticisms are rarely rooted in any deep understanding of Bohr’s methods. Rather than Bohr’s philosophy contaminating his science, Perović argues, it is his opponents’ philosophical prejudices that have led to misstatements, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Bohr’s physics. And Bohr can’t be understood by attempting to understand his philosophy, Perović asserts, because philosophy did not guide him — experiments did.

In fact, Bohr’s drive to understand the wave-particle paradox was fueled by a deep devotion to comprehending the experimental evidence in its totality. It was the same approach the younger Bohr took when developing his model of the atom in 1913 (SN: 7/13/13, p. 20). Various experiments suggested properties of the atom that seemed irreconcilable. But Bohr forged those experimental clues into a “master hypothesis” that produced a thoroughly novel understanding of the atom and its structure.

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Perović describes how Bohr’s process began with lower-level hypotheses stemming from features directly given by experiment. Spectral lines — different specific colors of light emitted by atoms — led to basic hypotheses that some vibratory process, of an atom itself or its constituents, produced electromagnetic radiation exhibiting precise patterns. Intermediate hypotheses about the structure of the atom did not explain such lines, though. And then Ernest Rutherford, on the basis of experiments in his lab, inferred that an atom was mostly empty space. It contained a dense, tiny central nucleus encompassing most of the mass, while lightweight electrons orbited at a distance. But that hypothesis didn’t mesh with the precise patterns of spectral lines. And such an atom would be unstable, persisting for less than a millisecond. From all these disparate experiment-based hypotheses, Bohr applied Planck’s quantum idea to construct a master hypothesis. He reconciled the spectral lines and Rutherford’s nuclear atom with a new atomic model, in which electrons maintained stability of the atom but jumped from one orbit to another, emitting specific patterns of spectral lines in the process.

As Perović demonstrates, Bohr followed a similar course in arriving at complementarity. While numerous experiments showed that light was a wave, by the early 1920s other experiments established that X-rays, highly energetic light, collided with electrons just as though both were particles (momentum and energy were conserved in the collisions just as the particle view required). Bohr’s master hypothesis, complementarity, seemed the only way forward.

Throughout the book, Perović relates how Bohr has been misinterpreted, his views misleadingly conflated with those of others (like John von Neumann and Werner Heisenberg), and his philosophy incorrectly portrayed as antirealist — suggesting that only observations brought reality into existence. Bohr never said any such thing, and in fact cautioned against using language so loosely.

Perović’s account offers a thorough survey of other historical investigations into Bohr’s work and draws liberally from Bohr’s own writings. It’s a nuanced and insightful presentation of the interplay of experiment and theory in the scientific process. This book is not easy reading, though. It’s not the place to seek clear explanations of quantum physics and Bohr’s interpretation of it. Perović opts for scholarly thoroughness and careful reasoning with a propensity for long sentences. But then again, Bohr’s writings were no breeze, either. In fact, a major complaint against Bohr has been expressed by authors who say his writings are very difficult to understand. It’s unfortunate that so many seem to think that because they can’t understand Bohr, he must have been wrong. Perović’s book provides a useful antidote to that attitude.

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