You know you want to. Everybody's doing it.
It's Entanglement City, baby!
That's right folks. Quantum entanglement is definitely the flavor of the month. (What? You don't have access to entanglement at your local library? Tsk.)
It's real, and people can do it. But what is it good for?
To date, entanglement is barely more than a demo. Quantum computing is coming up fast, and quantum cryptography and networks are almost here. I gather than entanglement is being introduced to ultraprecise measurements which are approaching the theoretical limits of precision.
This winter Samuel Greengard discusses another, potentially very significant use for entanglement: "Wayfinding Without GPS" [1].
In my own lifetime the satellite based Global Positioning System, which even your grandma calls "GPS", has become ubiquitous and indispensible. This is a simple, elegant idea, and it has been around quite a while.
One of the greatest limitations of satellite GPS is that it doesn't work everywhere. You have to get a strong enough signal from space, and GPS radio is blocked when you are indoors or unerground or underwater. Even, I gather, under dense trees. So, navigation systems still need to rely on other methods or do dead reckoning, at least some of the time.
I don't really grok how entanglement would be used for wayfinding, but obviously, spooky action at a distance has got to be handy, right? Generally, entanglement may lead to groups of sensors with highly precise measurements of relative position and motion. In this, entanglement lets you get the benefits of multiple sensors in parallel while reducing in noise.
Which, presumably, can be used to do inertial navigation. This also would be interesting for precise mapping, in 3D and without occlusion.
It looks to me like GPS is only one of many possible applications of entanglement to precision measurement [2].
Pretty cool. I'm starting to see what all the shouting is about.
- Samuel Greengard, Wayfinding Without GPS. Communications of the.ACM, 67 (1):17–19, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3627104
- Yi Xia, Aman R. Agrawal, Christian M. Pluchar, Anthony J. Brady, Zhen Liu, Quntao Zhuang, Dalziel J. Wilson, and Zheshen Zhang, Entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensing. Nature Photonics, 17 (6):470-477, 2023/06/01 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01178-0
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