The inevitable leakage of energy and information from a quantum system into its surrounding environment is the enemy of quantum technology. Now, researchers have demonstrated that it can be exploited to generate entanglement—the “resource” that quantum technologies use to perform tasks inaccessible to standard classical technologies.

A collaboration between physicists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago has realized a theoretical prediction in which an externally driven quantum system achieves entanglement through dissipation. While the original prediction relies on highly idealized settings, the researchers developed a new technique called synthetic squeezing to realize the phenomenon in a laboratory setting with a pair of superconducting qubits.

Moreover, the generated entanglement is in a steady state, meaning that, in principle, it can be maintained indefinitely over arbitrarily large distances. The researchers believe that this technique holds promise as a more robust and reliable alternative to current methods of entanglement generation.