Please see the full article in the link below. My thanks to Brian Flanagan for calling my attention to this discovery.
An excerpt:
"Researchers at UCSB blur the line between classical and quantum physics by connecting chaos and entanglement
By Sonia Fernandez
Monday, July 11, 2016 - 14:00
Using a small quantum system consisting of three superconducting qubits, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Google have uncovered a link between aspects of classical and quantum physics thought to be unrelated: classical chaos and quantum entanglement. Their findings suggest that it would be possible to use controllable quantum systems to investigate certain fundamental aspects of nature.
“It’s kind of surprising because chaos is this totally classical concept — there’s no idea of chaos in a quantum system,” Charles Neill, a researcher in the UCSB Department of Physics and lead author of a paper that appears in Nature Physics. “Similarly, there’s no concept of entanglement within classical systems. And yet it turns out that chaos and entanglement are really very strongly and clearly related.”
...
In the early 20th century quantum physics emerged, with its seemingly counterintuitive and sometimes controversial science, including the notions of superposition (the theory that a particle can be located in several places at once) and entanglement (particles that are deeply linked behave as such despite physical distance from one another).
...
Imagine taking a balloon full of air molecules, somehow tagging them so you could see them and then releasing them into a room with no air molecules, noted co-author and UCSB/Google researcher Pedram Roushan. One possible outcome is that the air molecules remain clumped together in a little cloud following the same trajectory around the room. And yet, he continued, as we can probably intuit, the molecules will more likely take off in a variety of velocities and directions, bouncing off walls and interacting with each other, resting after the room is sufficiently saturated with them.
“The underlying physics is chaos, essentially,” he said. The molecules coming to rest — at least on the macroscopic level — is the result of thermalization, or of reaching equilibrium after they have achieved uniform saturation within the system. But in the infinitesimal world of quantum physics, there is still little to describe that behavior. The mathematics of quantum mechanics, Roushan said, do not allow for the chaos described by Newtonian laws of motion.
To investigate, the researchers at UCSB physics professor John Martinis' lab devised an experiment using three quantum bits, the basic computational units of the quantum computer. Unlike classical computer bits, which utilize a binary system of two possible states (e.g., zero/one), a qubit can also use a superposition of both states (zero and one) as a single state. Additionally, multiple qubits can entangle, or link so closely that their measurements will automatically correlate. By manipulating these qubits with electronic pulses, Neill caused them to interact, rotate and evolve in the quantum analog of a highly sensitive classical system.
The result is a map of entanglement entropy of a qubit that, over time, comes to strongly resemble that of classical dynamics — the regions of entanglement in the quantum map resemble the regions of chaos on the classical map. The islands of low entanglement in the quantum map are located in the places of low chaos on the classical map.
“There’s a very clear connection between entanglement and chaos in these two pictures,” said Neill. “And, it turns out that thermalization is the thing that connects chaos and entanglement. It turns out that they are actually the driving forces behind thermalization.”
The publication can be read in the second link below.
http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/017014/entanglement-chaos
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3830.html
Nope.
There seems to be nothing especially wrong with the release except for the aura of mystery.
There are at least three alternative explanations:
a) The Second law of Thermodynamics is the common cause of chaos and quantum-to-classical transitions (partial "loss" of superposition and entanglement, as in the decoherence approach by Zurek);
b) Nature is chaotic at the most fundamental level and then quantum superposition and entanglement are a consequence of deterministic chaos. This alternative leads us to Bohmian mechanics;
c) The evolution of a quantum system produces classical chaos, at least epistemologically (classical probability-as-a-measure-of-ignorance would be a consequence of quantum uncertainty). I proposed this idea in a 1988 paper with my (then) supervisor, but the submission was rejected by the journal we sent it and then we gave up publishing. I will post it in RG in a couple of weeks (after returning from vacation).
If classical dynamical systems are deterministic, what is the origin of chaotic behavior? In this short paper (link below), presented in a meeting in 1988 (and rejected by the journal Analysis at the time), we discussed three possible explanations, one of them being the explanation of chaos from quantum uncertainty.
Presentation On Determinism and Chaotic Systems
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