I've recently seen some references to Dark Energy and Entanglement as possibly being related, but I haven't been able to fully evaluate such claims, though they got me thinking.
My basic question is about the persistence of relationships and correlations created by wavefunction interactions. Reading Penrose's Road to Reality, it struck me that he said something like "much of the wavefunction is concerned with such matters," meaning nonlocal matters.
Entanglement and nonlocal correlations are created or transferred through interactions between quantum systems. When a photon from an entangled pair is absorbed by Bob's detector, is the correlation with Alice's photon then passed on into the wavefunction of Bob's detector? Or is that correlation--whatever it is--completely destroyed, lost to the *entire* system, not just the entangled pair? (If destroyed, then how can entanglement be erased/restored?)
If correlations somehow persist as some form of information, do they accumulate and flow through the vast number of interactions in large local systems, for example, is there a quantity of non-local correlations largely trapped in the core of our sun that slowly leaks out through light and the solar wind?
Conversely, what are the effects of "ancient" correlations that may persist from very early events such as the breaking of the symmetry between the electric and magnetic forces or from the sudden end of the "dark ages" when light began to flow?
Sorry for "big" pile of questions. This is a hard one to boil down to a five word question!
Entanglements abide across spacetime irrespective of distance (in either space or time) until & unless decoherence sets in. In technical terms, entanglements persist as long as a valid Schrödinger equation does describe a relationship between the entangled entities (aka variables)
Decoherence can happen owing to a number of system evolution paths or events. May I recommend reading Dieter Zeh on the subject.
I do apologize for presenting such a muddle.
When one photon in an entangled pair is Absorbed by Alice, does *anything* of the entanglement get passed on into the wavefunction of Alices absorber? Is Alices absorber now somehow entangled with Bob's still-coherent photon? Penrose suggested that Alices photon then becomes hopelessly entangled with the Alices apparatus, but he is mute about the possiblity that Bob is now entangled, not with Alic'es photon but Alice's apparatus.
If entanglement or non-local relationships can be formed, can they be "destroyed" or is there some rule of conservation that applies?
I will look up Dieter Zeh to see what he has to say, then rest on this and try not to spout gibberish. I am admittedly trying to patch together language from several different disciplines and it is killing me! ;-).
If we goes back in time 13.7 billion year when the universe is very dense, was everything entangled together? If yes, then what happen to break this entanglement? Could a fossil entanglement remain? ¸At the horizon surface of a black hole, do everything get entangled? Does the entanglement phenomenon provides an epistemic basis for simultaneity of events for all observers?
Chris:
I read Zeh's "There are no Quantum Jumps, nor are there Particles!" and I *think* his essay conveys something very close to my interpretation/understanding of quantum mechanics, though I'll have to read more of his work to really see how he further addresses entanglement. I do appreciate you pointing out that reference.
Louis:
I strongly suspect there are more than one kind of fossil entanglements or persistent-correlations. However rare, it seems quite likely that in a huge universe there could be entangled pairs of photons from early in the universe that remain unresolved. I keep reading subtle suggestions that all electrons, for example, share some kind of non-local correlation due the very nature of looking at the universe as one Big Psi wavefunction, but I'm having trouble finding a technical reference that discusses this.
Also, I am unsure why the event-horizon itself would be cause any new entanglements (except via Hawking radiation). I can see asking if a singularity creates new entanglements or correlations, but not of the event horizon. As an aside, I also see no a-priori argument why entanglements cannot exist *across* an event horizon.
The reason I am asking these questions is that I am beginning to suspect that non-local correlations are qualitatively distinct from our traditional concept of "information," yet are still *some* kind of information that plays a critical role in the function of the universe even if that role is neither local nor strictly speaking causal.
Finally, I am unsure what you mean by "simultaneity of events for all observers," if you would like to clarify.
Dean
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