While the task of describing those correlations is difficult, describing a system of 100 entangled atoms with classical computer bits would be unimaginably hard. For instance, a complete classical description of aLL the quantum correlations among as many as 300 entangled particles would require more bits than the number of atoms in the visible universe. “But that’s the whole point and the reason we are doing this,” Endres says. “Things get so entangled that you need a huge amount of space to describe the information. It’s a complicated beast, but it’s useful.”
“Generally, the number of parameters you need to describe the system is going to scale up exponentially,” says Vidick, who is working on mathematical and computational tools to describe entanglement. “It blows up very quickly, which, in general, is why it’s hard to make predictions or simulations, because you can’t even represent these systems in your laptop’s memory.”