Researchers believe extra-terrestrials could well be trying to communicate with us across the universe by using quantum physics.
The basic idea of quantum physics is the ‘study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level’, which tries to uncover the properties and behaviours of the building blocks of nature.
On our own planet, quantum communications are trying to be developed by scientists, which would make information transfer so much faster and much more secure, but as yet they haven’t found a way to get it to work.
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The problem is, is that quantum networks are very fragile and susceptible to interference, but this latest study reveals that networks could zoom across space without breaking up.
“Quantum states you generally think of as very delicate and if there’s any kind of external interaction, you kind of destroy that state,” Arjun Berera, a theoretical physicist from the University of Edinburgh and the lead author of the research, told Science News.
“If you think about how communication is evolving on Earth, in 50 years’ time, probably classical communication will be completely gone and everything will be quantum.
“If you think about it sociologically, then, in this extra-terrestrial world maybe they don’t even have any more classical communication — maybe they’ll just use the technology we have.”
Berera and his colleague Jaime Calderón-Figueroa, a fellow theoretical physicist at Edinburgh University, ran calculations on the movement of X-rays across the emptiness of space to check for potential decoherence (the breaking up of the quantum state).
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If photons – particles of light – were used as the quantum particles, the researchers determined, they could be beamed across hundreds of thousands of light-years at least, a greater stretch of distance than the entire Milky Way galaxy.
“It is plausible that quantum communication mediated by photons could be established across interstellar distances, in particular for photons in the X-ray region below the electron mass,” write the researchers in their published paper.
This revelation gives astronomers another potential sign of life they can track, although they may not be able to decipher any incoming communications without a quantum computer, while the outgoing communications could take several years to reach their destinations.
“In principle, it should be possible to detect a quantum signal coming from an astrophysical body or even an intelligent signal from an extra-terrestrial civilisation,” added the researchers.
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