Comp Sci strikes again🤓

A team of four researchers has proved that entanglement doesn’t just weaken as temperature increases. Rather, in mathematical models of quantum systems such as the arrays of atoms in physical materials, there’s always a specific temperature above which it vanishes completely. 

“It’s not just that it’s exponentially small,” said Ankur Moitra of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the authors of the new result. “It’s zero.”

Researchers had previously observed hints of this behavior and dubbed it the sudden death of entanglement. But their evidence has always been indirect. The new finding, by contrast, has the force of a mathematical proof. It establishes the absence of entanglement in a much more comprehensive and rigorous way.

Curiously, the four researchers behind the new result aren’t even physicists, and they didn’t set out to prove anything about entanglement. They’re computer scientists who stumbled on the proof accidentally while developing a new algorithm.