Last night, before we went to sleep, we were talking about particle physics and quantum entanglement. I'm not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV. This morning I was drinking my coffee (current favorite: Lofbergs Lila Skånerost) and googling the subject, while Maswan was in the shower.
I was very excited to discover that apparently you can convert photons into plasmons and then back again without destroying the entanglement and went running to the bathroom with the laptop so I could read to him:
"Altewischer and coworkers in Leiden University in the Netherlands showed that entanglement between pairs of photons can survive even when one (or both) of the entangled photons is converted into a surface `plasmon` and then back again into a photon.
"Surface plasmons are oscillating electromagnetic fields strongly localized at the surface of a metal and associated with the collective motion of a large number of electrons. Surface plasmons are formed on metal films perforated by an array of holes smaller than the wavelength of the photons. The plasmon tunnels through the holes to form a similar plasmon on the other side, and eventually reconverts back into a photon."
In other news, unrelated to the precedence that physics takes over bathroom privacy, I've been following the Pirate Bay trial on Twitter via @spectrial, @sofia, @brokep, and @tpb. There's plenty more tagged #spectrial. I'm listening to the live feed from SR, too. I guess my Swedish is getting better, because I can actually understand some of it. (I put on SVT24 to see if there's any coverage, but they're just talking about Saab and Hillary Clinton.)
Tagged: My Life, Things of Interest, & Science