When you dodge deadly obstacles in the game Quantum Satellite, you’re not just playing for fun—you’re helping run experiments on a special payload called the Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment, or SEAQUE for short! And it’s currently orbiting around our planet on the International Space Station (ISS)!
SEAQUE payload inside the ISS before being placed in its final location outside. (photo credit: Don Pettit)
So, how does playing a game help SEAQUE with quantum space science? Well, every time you avoid the energy bar—whether it’s by veering left or right, or up or down—you’re making a quick decision that generates a number 0 or 1! Keep playing, and you’re creating a whole string of these choices; these in turn will be used in our experiment to determine what measurements are made on the entangled photons. (The photons themselves determine what the measurement outcomes will be!)
These random strings of choices are used as part of a test called the Bell Inequality Violation. This test helps us measure how well SEAQUE’s photons (the basic units of an electromagnetic field- or light!) are entangled. Entanglement describes a pair of particles, in this case photons, with properties that are linked very strongly to each other even if they are very far apart. To prove that these photons have correlated properties, but do not have some common cause or hidden instructions telling them how to act, the measurement choices made in the experiment should be as unpredictable as possible. In other words, every time you make a choice in the game, you’re directly helping run a measurement on the entangled photons in space! The more random your choices, the better. (Want to know more about entanglement and Bell tests, for which the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded? Check out some videos we’ve curated here; go to the bottom of the page.)
Why would anyone WANT entangled photons in space? Well, really mostly we wouldn’t - we’d prefer to use space as a convenient platform from which to distribute entangled photons to widely separated receive stations on the ground. Although SEAQUE doesn’t do that - all its created photons are created and measured locally - SEAQUE is a critical step toward a space-based quantum network. In addition to verifying the existence and quality of SEAQUE’s novel entanglement source, the experiment will also attempt to “anneal” (the “A” in SEAQUE) or repair radiation damage the single-photon detectors are experiencing in orbit. If we’re successful, that could substantially improve future quantum payload mission lifetimes.
Pretty awesome, right? Thanks for taking part in SEAQUE-ing out quantum science in space!
SEAQUE team (left to right): Kelsey Ortiz, Paul Kwiat, Liam Ramsey, Spencer Johnson, Michael Lembeck, and Makan Mohageg at the launch.
SEAQUE in the news:
SEAQUE has been featured on Space Insider, Science.NASA.gov, and NASA.gov.
The SEAQUE team would like to acknowledge:
Aegis Aerospace, UIUC Stu/dio, University of Waterloo, National University of Singapore, AdvR, UIUC LASSI, JPL, and Boeing.
SEAQUE being launched off of this planet in November 2024 from Kennedy Space Center. (photo credit: Liam Ramsey)