for Alan Barr, it started during the COVID-19 lockdown. “I had a little more time. I could sit and think,” he says.
He was delighted to be part of the success of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, the particle collider that discovered the Higgs boson. But now he wondered, had they missed a trick? “I spent a long time twisting pieces of it together. And I thought, ‘We’ve created this beautiful device, but maybe we can do even more with it. “Maybe we can,” he says.
The LHC is usually thought of as a machine for finding new particles. But now Barr and many other physicists are wondering whether it can also be used to investigate the underlying meaning of quantum theory and why it paints reality as so strange. is asking.
That’s exactly what Barr and his colleagues are now seriously investigating. Last year, they published experimental results showing that pairs of fundamental particles called top quarks can enter into a quantum state known as entanglement.
This was just the first of many entanglement experiments in the particle collider that could open up entirely new ways to study the nature of the universe. We can now ask why the reality of quantum mechanics is so difficult to pin down and what it has to do with experimenters, and even particles, having free will. Doing so could reveal whether spacetime is fundamental, or reveal realities even stranger than quantum mechanics. “There are so many different things you can do with this collider,” Barr said.
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