Orientation Entanglement - Elementary Description

Elementary Description

Spatial vectors alone are not sufficient to describe fully the properties of rotations in space.

Consider the following example. A coffee cup is suspended in a room by a pair of elastic rubber bands fixed to the walls of the room. The cup is rotated by its handle through a full twist of 360°, so that the handle is brought all the way around the central vertical axis of the cup and back to its original position.

Note that after this rotation, the cup has been returned to its original orientation, but that its orientation with respect to the walls is twisted. In other words, if we lower the coffee cup to the floor of the room, the two bands will coil around each other in one full twist of a double helix. This is an example of orientation entanglement: the new orientation of the coffee cup embedded in the room is not actually the same as the old orientation, as evidenced by the twisting of the rubber bands. Stated another way, the orientation of the coffee cup has become entangled with the orientation of the surrounding walls.

Clearly the geometry of spatial vectors alone is insufficient to express the orientation entanglement (the twist of the rubber bands). Consider drawing a vector across the cup. A full rotation will move the vector around so that the new orientation of the vector is the same as the old one. The vector alone doesn't know that the coffee cup is entangled with the walls of the room.

In fact, the coffee cup is inextricably entangled. There is no way to untwist the bands without rotating the cup. However, consider what happens instead when the cup is rotated, not through just one 360° turn, but two 360° turns for a total rotation of 720°. Then if the cup is lowered to the floor, the two rubber bands coil around each other in two full twists of a double helix. If the cup is now brought up through the center of one coil of this helix, and passed onto its other side, the twist disappears. The bands are no longer coiled about each other, even though no additional rotation had to be performed. (This experiment is more easily performed with a ribbon or belt. See below.)

Thus, whereas the orientation of the cup was twisted with respect to the walls after a rotation of only 360°, it was no longer twisted after a rotation of 720°. By only considering the vector attached to the cup, it is impossible to distinguish between these two cases, however. It is only when we attach a spinor to the cup that we can distinguish between the twisted and untwisted case.

In this situation, a spinor is a sort of polarized vector. In the diagram to the right, a spinor can be represented as a vector whose head is a flag lying on one side of a Möbius strip, pointing inward. Initially, suppose that the flag is on top of the strip as shown. As the coffee cup is rotated it carries the spinor, and its flag, along the strip. If the cup is rotated through 360°, the spinor returns to the initial position, but the flag is now underneath the strip, pointing outward. It takes another 360° rotation in order to return the flag to its original orientation.