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Phys. Rev. A 80, 044302 (2009) [4 pages]

Entanglement and nonlocality of a single relativistic particle

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Jacob Dunningham1, Veiko Palge1, and Vlatko Vedral1,2,3
1School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
2Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117543, Singapore
3Department of Physics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117542, Singapore

Received 7 January 2009; revised 25 March 2009; published 15 October 2009

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

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.80.044302
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevA.80.044302
PACS:
03.67.Mn, 03.65.Ud, 03.30.+p