In these many-body entangled systems, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“The particles act together like a single object whose identity lies not with the individual components but in a higher plane. It becomes something larger than itself,” says Spyridon (Spiros) Michalakis, outreach manager of Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) and a staff researcher. “Entanglement is like a thread that goes through every single one of the individual particles, telling them how to be connected to one another.”