This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Physicists at the University of Oxford have helped confirm that one of the strangest phenomena in physics—quantum entanglement—occurs even among some of the heaviest and most fleeting particles ever created. The discovery, made using the world's most powerful particle collider at CERN, has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Entanglement is the phenomenon in which two particles from the same origin remain connected, even if they move far apart in time and space. If something affects one particle, it will also affect all the particles with which it is entangled. This means that measuring a property of one particle instantly tells you something about its entangled partners, no matter how distant they are.
Albert Einstein famously called entanglement "spooky action at a distance," and the phenomenon has been demonstrated in a range of systems, including photons, electrons and trapped ions. Today, entanglement is no longer just a curiosity: It underpins emerging technologies such as quantum computers, ultra-secure quantum communication networks and next-generation sensors. For instance, in quantum computing, entanglement is used to manipulate multiple qubits in a single operation rather than individually.
This allows multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously. However, it was unknown whether quantum entanglement remains intact under more extreme conditions—such as the short-lived particles produced during highly energetic collisions. To test this, an international collaboration used the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland.
The team looked for entanglement in an entirely new setting: pairs of Z bosons that exist for only a fraction of a second before decaying. "Quantum mechanics underpins computing, security and many areas of physics. However, quantum mechanics has mysteries and puzzles that are not yet fully understood.
Using particle colliders allows us to test quantum mechanics at energies a trillion times higher and over distances smaller than the size of the nucleus. This probes some of the extreme conditions where quantum mechanics might break down, which would have profound consequences for the foundations of science," said study co-author Professor Alan Barr of the Department of Physics. The Z bosons studied were produced in the decay of a Higgs boson—the particle discovered at the LHC in 2012—which briefly split into two Z bosons before each decayed further into pairs of electrons or muons.
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