By Peter Weiss
In a new feat of quantum-scale manipulation, physicists have joined five photons in a condition of mutually linked properties called entanglement.
Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues achieved this complex state by firing an intense laser beam into a collection of crystals, mirrors, and detectors.
Five is a magic number in this context because entanglement of that many or more photons or other particles would enable a future quantum computer to find and eliminate random errors in its data, Pan says. Five-particle entanglement also makes possible a previously unrealizable scheme for transferring quantum data—which can have odd characteristics, such as representing several numbers at once.