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Abstract:

Recent work has argued that the concepts of entanglement and nonlocality must be taken seriously even in systems consisting of only a single particle. These treatments, however, are nonrelativistic, and, if single-particle entanglement is fundamental, it should also persist in a relativistic description. Here, we consider a spin-1/2 particle in a superposition of two different velocities as viewed by an observer in a relativistically boosted inertial frame and show that the entanglement between the two velocity modes survives right up to the speed of light. We also discuss how quantum gates could be implemented in this way and apply our results to the case of a superconductor. In particular, we show that an s -wave superconductor would have p -wave components for a boosted observer. © 2009 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

Recently some authors have pointed out that there exist nonclassical correlations which are more general, and possibly more fundamental, than entanglement. For these general quantum correlations and their classical counterparts, under the action of decoherence, we identify three general types of dynamics that include a peculiar sudden change in their decay rates. We show that, under suitable conditions, the classical correlation is unaffected by decoherence. Such dynamic behavior suggests an operational measure of both classical and quantum correlations that can be computed without any extremization procedure. © 2009 The American Physical Society.