New quantum camera capable of snapping photos of ghosts



New quantum camera capable of snapping photos of 'ghosts'   MNN - August 28, 2014
By utilizing a process that Einstein famously called "spooky," scientists have successfully caught "ghosts" on film for the first time using quantum cameras. The "ghosts" captured on camera weren't the kind you might first think; scientists didn't discover the wandering lost souls of our ancestors. Rather, they were able to capture images of objects from photons that never actually encountered the objects pictured.

The technology has been dubbed "ghost imaging". -- "Spooky" Quantum Entanglement Reveals Invisible Objects   National Geographic - August 27, 2014

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Normal cameras work by capturing light that bounces back from an object. That's how optics are supposed to work. So how can it be possible to capture an image of an object from light if the light never bounced off the object? The answer in short: quantum entanglement.

Entanglement is the weird instantaneous link that has been shown to exist between certain particles even if they are separated by vast distances. How exactly the phenomenon works remains a mystery, but the fact that it works has been proven.

Quantum cameras capture ghost images by making use of two separate laser beams that have their photons entangled. Only one beam encounters the object pictured, but the image can nevertheless be generated when either beam strikes the camera.

For the experiment, researchers passed a beam of light through etched stencils and into cutouts of tiny cats and a trident that were about 0.12 inches tall. A second beam of light, at a different wavelength from the first beam but nevertheless entangled with it, traveled on a separate line and never hit the objects. Amazingly, the second beam of light revealed pictures of the objects when a camera was focused on it, even though this beam never encountered the objects.

Because the two beams were at different wavelengths, it could eventually lead to improved medical imaging or silicon chip lithography in hard-to-see situations. For instance, doctors might use this method for generating images in visible light even though the images were actually captured using a different kind of light, such as infrared.




Schrodinger's Cat Thought Experiment


"Spooky" Quantum Entanglement Reveals Invisible Objects - August 27, 2014

Schrodinger's Cat Comes into View with Strange Physics   Live Science - August 27, 2014
The cats represent the famous Schrodinger cat paradox, in which a quantum cat closed in a box can be dead and alive at the same time. The dark and light cat body outlines are images of an etched piece of silicon. They arise due to destructive and constructive quantum interference, respectively. In this experiment the photons that interact with the silicon are not detected, while the images are obtained by detecting only photons that never interact with the object. By sending green, red and yellow laser beams down a path to detector, researchers have shed light on the famous physics idea known as the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. For physicists, Schrodinger's cat involves picturing a cat, in a box, with a vial of poison that can kill the cat if it opens. Over any given period there's a 50-50 chance the poison vial will open, and a person who opens the box after a given time and looks at the cat will then observe that it is either dead or alive. Most people would say that even before you open the box, before you can see the cat, it's still in either one state or the other, either dead or alive.


Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be both alive and dead, this state being tied to an earlier random event. Although the original "experiment" was imaginary, similar principles have been researched and used in practical applications. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. In the course of developing this experiment, Schršdinger coined the term Verschrankung (quantum entanglement).





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