For Alan Barr, it began throughout the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit more time. I could sit and think,” he says.
He had loved being half of the success at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) close to Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that found the Higgs boson. But now, he questioned, have been they lacking a trick? “I had spent long hours screwing bits of it together. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve built this beautiful piece of apparatus, but maybe we could be doing more with it,’ ” he says.
The LHC is usually seen as a machine for locating new particles. But now Barr and a slew of different physicists are asking if it may also be used to probe the underlying that means of quantum concept and why it paints reality as being so deeply bizarre.
That’s precisely what Barr and his colleagues at the moment are investigating in earnest. Last yr, they printed the outcomes of an experiment through which they confirmed that pairs of basic particles referred to as high quarks could be put into the quantum state generally known as entanglement.
This was simply the first of many entanglement experiments at particle colliders that could open up an entire new method of learning the nature of the universe. We can now ask why reality in quantum mechanics is so exhausting to pin down and what this has to do with experimenters — and even particles — having free will. Doing so could reveal whether or not space-time is prime or maybe unveil a deeper reality that’s even stranger than quantum mechanics. “We can do really different things with this collider,” says Barr.
…