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Computer scientists prove that heat destroys quantum entanglement

While devising a new quantum algorithm, four researchers accidentally established a hard limit on the “spooky” phenomenon.

To understand where quantum algorithms and the computers that can run them might offer an advantage, researchers often analyze mathematical models called spin systems, which capture the basic behavior of arrays of interacting atoms. A bit bummed that they’d come in second, Tang and her collaborators began corresponding with Álvaro Alhambra, a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid and one of the authors of the rival paper. But when Alhambra read through a preliminary draft of the four researchers’ proof, he was surprised to discover that they’d proved something else in an intermediate step: In any spin system in thermal equilibrium, entanglement vanishes completely above a certain temperature.

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