Entangled electrons in the Stern-Gerlach experiment?

[Quarky nerd]

I have always been interested in entagled electrons. so I thought about the stern gerlack experiment and simly wondered what would happen to entagled electrons in such an experiment. (although the prefix says high school i am able to appreciate more complicated answers).

 

[phinds]

What research have you done so far? What have you found out?

 

[Quarky nerd]

well i understand that the stern gerlack exeriment utilizes an ununiform magnetic field in order push electrons of different spins into different places.

 

[PeterDonis]

[Edit: removed comment in response to "ununiform", I had misread the post]

in order push electrons of different spins into different places.

More precisely, electrons with spins in different directions. All electrons have spins of the same magnitude.

And even more precisely, what the Stern-Gerlach apparatus does is split a beam of electrons into two beams, one with spin "up" in the chosen direction, the other with spin "down" in the chosen direction.

 

[Nugatory]

well i understand that the stern gerlack exeriment utilizes an ununiform magnetic field in order push electrons of different spins into different places.

By "ununiform" do you mean "nonuniform"? Asking because "ununiform" is very likely to be misread by a native English speaker.

 

[PeterDonis]

I thought about the stern gerlack experiment and simly wondered what would happen to entagled electrons in such an experiment.

Can you be more specific about the kind of scenario you are thinking about? How do the electrons get entangled, and how are they fed into the Stern-Gerlach apparatus?

 

[PeterDonis]

By "ununiform" do you mean "nonuniform"? Asking because "ununiform" is very likely to be misread by a native English speaker.

Yes, indeed, as I proved by example. I have edited my post #4 to remove that comment.

 

[Quarky nerd]

sorry for my grammar yes I had meant nonuniform. and from what I understand( if this is not the case please correct me) it wouldn't matter how the electrons were entagled as long as they were entangled before fed into the experiment. as for means of projection i was thinking a small particle accelerator

 

[PeterDonis]

it wouldn't matter how the electrons were entagled as long as they were entangled before fed into the experiment

Normally when considering the Stern-Gerlach experiment we treat the electrons as being fed through the experiment one at a time. Are you thinking of having two entangled electrons fed through the apparatus one at a time?

Also, "entangled" isn't a sufficiently precise description; there is more than one way of having two electrons be entangled. What specific entangled state are you thinking of?

 

[Quarky nerd]

i was unaware that there were multiple types of entaglement. could you eleborate.

 

[PeterDonis]

i was unaware that there were multiple types of entaglement. could you eleborate.

Entanglement means, basically, that certain observables of the two electrons are correlated. But there are multiple observables that could be correlated: position, momentum, spin, for example. Which observables of the two electrons were you thinking would be correlated?

 

[Quarky nerd]

ummmmmm i was thinking spin but this answers a lot of important questions

 

[PeterDonis]

i was thinking spin

That's what I had expected, since the Stern-Gerlach apparatus measures spin. But it's good to be explicit.

Then, as you have probably guessed from my last post, the answer is that if you send two electrons whose spins are entangled through a Stern-Gerlach apparatus one at a time, the results of the measurements (which beam the two electrons come out in) will be correlated. The exact correlation will depend on exactly how the spins are entangled. The simplest case is the "singlet" state, where the spins of the electrons are entangled in such a way that they always give opposite measurement results (one spin "up" and the other spin "down").

 

[Quarky nerd]

thank you very much this has been multitudes of help for more projects than i expected

 

[PeterDonis]

thank you very much

You're welcome! I'm glad this was helpful.