Were all quarks, leptons and gluons quantum entangled by the Big Bang? If so, what decoupled them?
Asked by
ETpro (
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August 3rd, 2013
It appears that the Big Bang began from a very small point in spacetime, and went through an incredibly rapid expansion for one millionth of a second. At that point, expansion had cooled the super-hot, energetic beginning Universe to a mere 1000 GeV (about 10 million million degrees). At that point, the forces of nature assumed their present properties (such as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces) and the ‘quarks’, the elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter, started wandering freely. Thus, I would assume they were all quantum entangled at that point.
They are not all entangled today. When we want to study entanglement, we have to deliberately cause them to interact and become entangled, or find ones that have recently interacted by chance encounters. So how did an entire Universe of entangled particles lose it’s initial hyper-entanglement?
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8 Answers
Ah, at last one of your questions I can answer Spontaneous combustion
Ha! Things might tend to singe a bit at 10 million million degrees.
Do we know they were all entangled initially? Do we know they are not all entangled today? An entangled particle doesn’t behave oddly in any way so how could we tell if it is entangled?
@flutherother I can only answer your first question intuitively. Since they began “life” squeezed into a space smaller than a nickle, I would take it they were born entangled in the instant of the big bang. In answer to the second question, if all the quarks, leptons and photons were initially entangled on a massive scale, each with every other one, and they still were today, then we could observe entanglement in them in exactly the same experimental way we observe it in particles we have caused to interact and become entangled. But we do not see such mass entanglement.
My understanding is that observation breaks the entanglement. It is not a tangible physical property. Entanglement can exist between two photons not present at the same time, however, observation of the first breaks the entanglement for all intents and purposes, and gives away the second state prior to observation.
In real world conditions, most particles are entangled. Here is an article with the most helpful quote I found to explain the situation is the following:
When you consider larger systems, perhaps having thousands (or trillions) of particles, the quantum description is essentially the same, but the way the quantum attributes of the system scale with size changes the probabilities considerably. Now the pure states form only a very small portion of the possible quantum states, and as a result, the more probable behavior is that parts of the system are entangled with each other.
@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Excellent information. Thanks so much for the link. Leakage. It leaks out over time into the surroundings. 13.72 billion years could allow for a lot of leakage.
History does not exist until observed in the present. Everybody thinks I am being flippant.
Strange. Here I thought I was part of the set known ae everybody, and yet I don’t think you are being flippant.
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