Quantum technology promises big things for digital security and computing power, but the very thing it relies upon - quantum entanglement - has so far proven too fickle to reliably control.
A new method for entangling particles is set to change that, providing the all-important quantum states when we want it, for as long as we need it.
Physicists from QuTech in Delft in the Netherlands are no stranger to the whimsies of quantum entanglement - the phenomenon where two particles become inextricably linked so that whatever happens to one instantly affects the other, no matter how far away it is. Famously, Einstein called entanglement 'spooky action at a distance' because .
In 2015, Delft physicists nailed shut a pesky loophole that could have shown it was less 'spooky' than Einstein ever suggested.
In their 2015 experiment, they used transmitted photons to entangle two electrons over a distance of 1.3 kilometres.
The origins of the photons and the distances apart were used to show this whole magic act was indeed truly weird but real, experimentally confirming quantum entanglement without any loopholes for the first time.
But that same method of mixing photons with electrons has now proven useful in another way – they play a key role in a method that can generate 40 entanglements on demand in a single second.
"This is a thousand times faster than with the old method," says physicist Peter Humphreys, putting it into perspective.
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