As I'm sitting on a bench, a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I contemplate the black and starry sky. Dragging smoke from the cigarette and drinking some coffee, I think of the light that crosses the Universe all the way from the farthest stars.
A strange idea does not give me peace.
Like a mosquito, it irritates me with its perpetual buzz. Does the light that comes to us from far away contain quantum information, just like the one I produce in the laboratory, with the help of mirrors, beam splitters and prisms?
We used to encode quantum information in photons by manipulating the polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM). It’s tedious work, but in the end, twisting the polarization and creating OAM, using beam splitters and prisms, a quantum message is stored in a tiny single photon.
More smoke, more coffee.
Surprisingly, dead stars can provide a plausible solution to that question. Remarkably, our laborious work in the is easily done, naturally, by the gravity around rotating black holes.
Black holes are changing the “face” of the surrounding spacetime, curving and twisting it. While traveling through this distorted spacetime, the photons twist the polarization and create OAM. Finally, if they finally manage to escape the gravity of the black hole, they have a quantum message stored. A message that we might be able to read. If this is the case then...
Unbelievably, a quantum computer already exists in nature!
More smoke, more coffee.
Still, what an irony to think that gravity is creating the “spooky action at a distance”. I wonder what Einstein would have said about this, as I finish my last drop of coffee.
I finish the cigarette and it's time to put on paper all these thoughts. You can find them in my newly published research in the New Astronomy journal (Creation of single-photon entangled states around rotating black holes -- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newast.2017.09.001).
Now, all that remains is to decipher the quantum message that the black holes send us. But that's a story for another coffee.
