Physicists Caught Two Atoms Talking to Each Other
Illustration: TU DELFT/SCIXEL
A team of physicists in the Netherlands and Germany recently placed a bunch of titanium atoms under a scanning tunneling microscope. Those atoms were in constant, quiet interaction with each other through the directions of their spins. In a clever feat, the researchers were able to home in on a single pair of atoms, zapping one with an electric current in order to flip its spin. They then measured the reaction of its partner.
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When two atoms have spins that are interdependent, they are considered quantumly entangled. That entanglement means that the behavior of one atom has a direct impact on the other, and theory says this should remain true even when they are separated by great distances. In this case, the titanium atoms were a little over a nanometer (a millionth of a millimeter) apart, close enough for the two particles to interact with one another but far enough away that the inter