Watson Lecture: "What Entanglement Can Tell Us About Our World"

This lecture has already occurred. Check back soon for the link to the recording.

On Wednesday, May 11, at 5 p.m. PDT, Scott Cushing, Caltech assistant professor of chemistry and KNI-Wheatley Scholar in Nanoscience, will continue the 2021–22 Watson Lecture season with "What Entanglement Can Tell Us About Our World."

Watch the video introduction for his talk, here.

Entanglement refers to a connection that can occur between quantum particles even when they are far apart from each other. Entanglement underpins everything from quantum teleportation to the quantum computation revolution. In this lecture, Cushing will discuss a less-explored aspect of entanglement: what we can learn about both small and somewhat larger objects when they are forced to interact with entangled photons. The knowledge gained from these new tools, Cushing says, could lead to cutting-edge technologies.

"People are looking at using entanglement for LIDAR, for self-driving cars," he notes. "They're looking at it … for creating new ways to test health or to image your brain and to go and actually explore these in more depth than currently possible. There is also the field of quantum information sciences.That's the idea of basically making these new types of communication, whether they're high-level encryption or just new ways [to] transmit data over large distances."