NTT researchers entangle photons 300 kilometers apart using fiber optics

Japanese telecom giant NTT is concerned with more than routing phone calls — it is exploring the technology to enable a new kind of super-fast communication based on quantum mechanics. NTT’s recent experiments with quantum entanglement have reached a true milestone in the understanding of this phenomenon. A team led by Takahiro Inagaki at the NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Kanagawa has managed to keep two particles entangled over a distance of 300 kilometers through fiber optic cable.

Entanglement has been of huge interest to physicists over the years for its ability to seemingly transfer information simultaneously from one location to the other without actually crossing the space in between. Two particles that are entangled share the same quantum state, describing properties like spin, momentum, and polarization. Thus, observing one of the particles tells you about the other.

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A cheap, powerful digital microscope using your smartphone and an old laser pointer

There is little reason anymore to buy one of those toy microscopes from the hobby shop for your budding biologist. To observe all that the microworld has to offer, the focus has shifted from the scope, to the camera. In other words, instead of trying to rig a camera to an existing scope, it now seems to make more sense to just build the scope around the camera. A cool project to build a high-power digital microscope, using an iPhone and the focusing lens from a cheap laser pointer, recently showed up on the Instructables website. Ten minutes and twenty dollars may be a little bit optimistic, but the video below does make it look easy.
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