Large entanglement in crystals
Description: Quantum theory is often presented as the theory of the microscopic world. However, things have changed dramatically over the last decade. Today one can envision manipulating large quantum systems, while mastering individual degrees of freedom. This opens up the possibility to access quantum effects in unexplored domains and provide motivations to entirely revisit a great number of questions on the quantum/classical transition.The vision of this project is to explore experimentally and theoretically large entangled systems and to collect evidence that entanglement can survive at large scales. This will be done experimentally as we propose to demonstrate entanglement between two or more massive crystals with hundreds of entanglement bits (e-bits), hundred of thousands of excitations and billions of ions. For this purpose, we'll use Neodymium doped YSO crystals and the AFC (Atomic Frequency Comb) protocol for multimode quantum memories.Experiments will advanced hand in hand with theory. The theoretical activities will aim to sharpen the notions of ''large'' and ''macroscopic''. Questions like ''What is large entanglement?'' and ''What deserves to be called entanglement between macroscopic systems?'' will receive new insightful answers, deepening our understanding of Nature.Although this project focuses on fundamental questions, we expect surprising applications. In particular the high sensitivity of large entanglement to various decoherence mechanisms can be seen positively as a potential resource for quantum sensors.
Amount: CHF 683,700
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Project funding
Start date: 2014-06-01
End date: 2017-05-31
Investigator: Gisin, Nicolas
Institution: University of Geneva – GE
Funded outputs count: 9
Funder award ID: 149109
OpenAlex ID: G963669578