Educators, Learners
Quantum Satellite: SEAQUE live Bell Test
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When you dodge deadly obstacles in the game Quantum Satellite, you’re not just playing for fun you’re helping run experiments on a special payload called the Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment, or SEAQUE for short! And it’s currently orbiting around our planet on the International Space Station (ISS)!
So, how does playing a game help SEAQUE with quantum space science? Well, every time you avoid the energy bar (whether it’s by veering left or right, or up or down) you’re making a quick decision that generates a number 0 or 1! Keep playing, and you’re creating a whole string of these choices; these in turn will be used in our experiment to determine what measurements are made on the entangled photons. (The photons themselves determine what the measurement outcomes will be!)
These random strings of choices are used as part of a test called the Bell Inequality Violation. This test helps us measure how well SEAQUE’s photons (the basic units of an electromagnetic field- or light!) are entangled. Entanglement describes a pair of particles, in this case photons, with properties that are linked very strongly to each other even if they are very far apart.