The team hopes that this might become a powerful tool that paves the way for new quantum communication protocols that use topology as an alphabet for quantum information processing across entanglement-based channels.

The findings reported in the article are crucial because researchers have grappled for decades with developing techniques to preserve entangled states. The fact that topology remains intact even as entanglement decays suggests a potentially new encoding mechanism that utilizes entanglement, even in scenarios with minimal entanglement where traditional encoding protocols would fail.

Edit: Here is the quoted article link.

And here’s is the published paper.

Edit: someone below linked to this so you don’t have to pay for knowledge

  • mathemachristian[he]
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    1010 months ago

    Well one is a physical phenomenon and one is a mathematical type of model. So without going further into the article I assume they use topology to model quantum behaviour.

    Its like saying light and sine waves are inextricably linked. One is reality and one is the abstract model to help understand that reality

    • @MojoMcJojoOP
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      310 months ago

      That’s a great example, thank you. So we’re beginning to discover a way to model of the fabric of reality?

      • mathemachristian[he]
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        10 months ago

        I am no physicist so I wouldn’t know lol

        I can tell you about topology though, its essentially a way to talk about a space where points don’t have a distance to each other. By that I mean there does not exist a function to measure the distance between two points, which is fundamentally different from “all points are so close we cannot measure their distance”. In the latter case a distance might still exist in reality, its just our instruments are not fine enough to detect it. What we mean however is that it makes “no sense”, for whatever reason, to talk about distance. The main thing of topology then is that we can still talk about properties of a space, for example whether any two points on a surface can be connected by a path, even though they don’t have a distance to eachother or to any of the points linking them.

        You definitely lose a lot without the possibility to measure distance but not as much as one might expect. Another example would be that it is possible to distinguish between a torus and a sphere (or any other genus).

    • @MojoMcJojoOP
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      10 months ago

      Sorry for not including the link to the article. Edit: here is the published paper

    • @douglasg14b
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      10 months ago

      You act unsurprised like this is obvious. Yet understand that light and shine waves are related is a pretty big step from not knowing it.

      Assuming it without demonstration doesn’t count. Anyone can assume anything. And a broken clock will always be right twice a day.

      • mathemachristian[he]
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        410 months ago

        My point is that “intextricably linked” makes no sense when talking about an abstract model and a real phenomenon. They aren’t inextricably “linked”, one is real the other isn’t how could they possibly be linked. It’s the person modeling reality that makes the link.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        a broken clock will always be right twice a day.

        And sometimes even a calculator can be a clock!