Extended Entanglements...

To verify entanglement among the three photons, the physicists measured the times that the photons arrived at a detector. This 2D histogram shows that groups of three photons are all localized to a small region, indicating strong correlations in the arrival times of the three photons. Image credit: L. K. Shalm, et al. ©2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited

The physicists, from the University of Waterloo and the University of Calgary, have published their paper on three-photon energy-time entanglement in a recent issue of Nature Physics. As the physicists explain, this new form of entanglement is the three-photon version of the famous EPR correlations for continuous variables (e.g., position and momentum) between two particles. The EPR thought experiment, published in 1935, raised questions about the fundamental concepts underlying the young theory of quantum mechanics. "The Heisenberg uncertainty principle forbids one from simultaneously discovering both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary accuracy," lead author Krister Shalm of the University of Waterloo told Phys.org. "EPR pointed out that, if you create a pair of entangled particles, it is possible to measure both the position and momentum of both of them with arbitrary precision. It is still impossible to learn both the position and momentum of each of the individual particles, but, instead, we can learn information about the total position and momentum they share. Entangled particles, in some sense, are the ultimate team players. They lose their own individual identity with all the information in the system contained in the correlations."

Phys.org: Physicists extend entanglement in Einstein experiment, Lisa Zyga