Lucas Sá

Five superconducting qubits on a chip: the stage for a performance of quantum chaos. Four qubits form the system, and the fifth acts as the environment, introducing dissipation. After a short evolution, the environment is discarded, leaving the system with an open quantum map, an operator that transforms the system's state.

Quantum entanglement is like an invisible web that connects particles even when they are far apart. In large systems (say, a piece of material) this web can either quickly weave through all the atoms or tangle into a knot and stay put. The first case is called quantum chaos, the second localization.