Towards applications

The detection of the two high energetic photons coming from the annihilation of an electron and a positron is a well-established successful technology to image metabolic processes in living bodies (PET: Positron Emission Tomography). Positronium atoms, however, can also decay into three photons which have never been experimentally proven  (due to several technical reasons). A new tomography build by the J-PET collaboration, which I have jointed 2016, has proven to meet all the requirements to observe these frequent decays based on new cutting-edge technology coming from Particle Physics. My very recent publication “Genuine Multipartite Entanglement in the Three-Photon Decay of Positronium”, a joint publication with Prof. Pawel Moskal the father of the J-PET, shows that the surprising survival of genuinely multipartite entanglement -- a very powerful type of entanglement -- even under strong mixing. This may offer a new potential possibility, i.e. we can deduce quantum information from metabolic processes, a marker for e.g. cancer or changes in the structure of the considered material/tissue based on a quantum phenomenon. In addition to the local information of a standard PET-image (as e.g. the one of my brain) for each pixel we want to record the quantum entanglement via designed entanglement witnesses from positronium. Thus quantum information on (strong) correlations could one day serve as a biomarker for medicine, i.e. doctors may not only obtain classical information but also quantum information of metabolic processes.