January 2, 2008 | 9:23 am

Weizmann team finds ‘telepathy’ between particles

Posted by Adam Wills

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As a follow-up to the famous double-split experiment, which offered proof of quantum mechanics (that one object can be in two places at the same time), a team at the the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot has found that identical particles used a form of remote communication when fired through two tiny slits, reports Haaretz.

It turned out that the two particles were “reading each other’s thoughts”: Each electron “knew” the other’s trajectory, even though they were remote from each other. When the researchers slightly modified the trajectory of one electron, the other electron acted as though it were aware of the modification.

The experiment, whose results were published a few months ago in the scientific journal Nature, was conducted by a research team led by Prof. Mordehai Heiblum, who heads the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute.

Nissim Ofek, 33, a doctoral student from, is part of a research team that carried out a slightly different version of the experiment. He joined the team about three years after the start of the experiment. His job was to activate the tiny facility in which the unique phenomenon is measured, which is built of semiconductor materials and is one-tenth of a millimeter long.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Ofek says. “The material has to be pure, and there are a great many things that have to be calibrated for something to come out of it.”

Here’s how the whole double-split thing works…