What Can We Learn from Entanglement and Quantum Tomography?

Abstract

Entanglement has become a hot topic in nuclear and particle physics, although many physicists are not sure they know what it means. We maintain that an era of understanding and using quantum mechanics on a dramatically new basis has arrived. We review a viewpoint that treats the subject as being primarily descriptive and completely free of the intellectual straitjackets and mysticism argued over long ago. Quantum probability is an extension of classical probability, but with universal uses. Density matrices describe systems where entanglement or its absence is a classification tool. Most of these have been known for decades, but there is a new way of understanding them that is liberated from the narrow outlook of the early days.