内容来源：https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-jamming-explores-the-truly-fundamental-principles-of-nature-20260417/

内容总结：

量子“干扰”现象挑战自然基本法则，密码学安全面临深层拷问

随着量子计算技术从理论走向现实，传统密码体系面临被破解的风险。为此，科学家多年来致力于开发能抵御量子计算攻击的新型加密技术，并利用量子力学原理构建理论上绝对安全的通信体系。然而，一个根本性问题逐渐浮现：如果量子力学本身并非自然的终极理论，这些基于量子规则的安全协议是否依然可靠？

香港大学量子信息理论家拉维尚卡尔·拉马纳坦指出：“在密码协议设计中，我们需要保持‘偏执’。应尽可能减少协议背后的假设，甚至设想未来某天人们发现量子力学并非自然的最終理论。”这种担忧并非空穴来风——当前量子力学与引力理论的难以调和，暗示着可能存在超越量子力学的新物理规律。

为此，部分密码学家开始转向更基础的原理寻求支撑。他们不再局限于量子力学框架，而是深入挖掘因果律等根本概念，试图构建更稳固的安全基石。

以量子密钥分发技术为例，该技术利用量子纠缠的“单配性”原理实现安全通信：任何窃听行为都会破坏纠缠状态从而暴露。但若“单配性”在未来理论中不再成立，且通信方无法完全控制设备，外部攻击者就可能通过“量子干扰”悄然改变纠缠关联，在不留痕迹的情况下破坏通信安全。

波兰雅盖隆大学理论物理学家米哈乌·埃克斯坦用一则思想实验形象说明了“干扰”的概念：假设魔术师吉姆通过某种方式，在不违反光速限制的前提下，远程改变了一对纠缠粒子之间的关联性质，使得原本必然相反的状态变为相同。这种看似违背直觉的操作，在理论上可能不破坏因果律。

早在上世纪90年代，格伦豪斯、波佩斯库和罗尔利希等学者就已提出“干扰”概念，探索在遵守“禁止超光速通信”原则的前提下，理论能多大程度超越量子力学规则。近年来，随着设备无关量子密码等技术的发展，学界对“干扰”的研究重新兴起。

2016年，拉马纳坦与帕韦乌·霍罗代茨基发现，一旦允许“干扰”类关联存在，现有设备无关密码学所依赖的纠缠单配性将完全失效。这一结论引发了激烈讨论。尽管“干扰”过程不违反光速限制原则，但其对遥远量子态的操控仍带有“幽灵般的超距作用”色彩，挑战着人们对因果关系的传统认知。

法国国家信息与自动化研究所的米尔贾姆·韦伦曼指出：“在量子基础研究中，我们非常严肃地对待无信号原则。”如今，包括伦敦国王学院的罗杰·科尔贝克在内的多个团队，正以“干扰”作为极端案例，试图厘清不同理论中的因果关系运作机制，寻找可能被“干扰”破坏的新基本原理。

2025年12月，拉马纳坦、霍罗代茨基、埃克斯坦等学者联合发表的预印本论文，进一步推动了相关讨论。目前多个研究团队正通过对话澄清概念、修正误解，共同探索物理理论背后的根本原则。

“最吸引我的问题是，”埃克斯坦表示，“这背后是否存在新物理学？自然规律能否容纳此类现象？”这场围绕量子“干扰”的探索，不仅关乎未来通信安全的根基，更可能触及我们对自然本质的理解边界。

中文翻译：

量子“干扰”探索自然的基本法则

引言

过去几十年间，研究者们逐渐认识到，量子计算机终将有能力破解当前数字世界广泛使用的加密体系。为应对这一威胁，密码学界耗费多年研发新型加密方案，以期抵御未来配备量子计算机的密码破译者。

与此同时，科学家们还巧妙运用量子力学原理构建了全新的通信保密体系。但量子力学与早前的“经典”力学一样，终究只是描述自然的理论模型。倘若未来出现更完善的理论取代量子力学，就像百年前量子力学颠覆牛顿物理学那样，这些基于量子原理的保密技术是否仍能确保安全？

“对于密码协议的设计，保持警惕总是有益的。”香港大学量子密码学研究者、量子信息理论家拉维尚卡尔·拉马纳坦表示，“我们应当尽量减少协议背后的假设条件。不妨设想未来某天，人们发现量子力学并非自然的终极理论。”

这种可能性值得深思。当前悬而未决的难题——例如如何调和量子力学与引力理论——暗示着后量子时代的自然理论可能包含超乎想象的崭新内容。

为防范现有协议建立在错误假设之上，部分量子密码学家开始探寻更基础的理论基石。他们不再局限于量子力学框架，转而向因果律这一根本概念深处挖掘。

隐秘的干扰

理解该领域进展的一个切入点，是考察量子密钥分发技术。该技术利用量子力学特性传递密钥（用于解密信息的密码），确保任何窃密行为都无法隐蔽进行。量子密钥分发依赖量子纠缠现象——两个粒子通过自旋等属性形成关联态。这种纠缠态如同设下精密的警报装置：若有人试图窃取密钥而干扰纠缠态，入侵行为将立即破坏纠缠关联，使窃密行为暴露无遗。这源于量子力学的基本原理——“纠缠独占性”。

但若这条原理失效呢？假设通信方无法完全掌控设备，外部攻击者就可能微妙改变粒子的纠缠特性，在不留痕迹的情况下破坏通信安全。

这个过程被称为“量子干扰”，近年来已成为研究热点。

对许多科学家而言，干扰现象的魅力在于能同时深化对量子力学和因果本质的理解。他们思索：是否存在某种深层原理禁止干扰行为？倘若没有这类禁令，现实世界中是否可能出现干扰现象？

干扰者吉姆

波兰雅盖隆大学理论物理学家米哈乌·埃克斯坦喜欢用故事阐释干扰现象。故事主角是量子力学阐释中经典的角色——爱丽丝与鲍勃。

“假设爱丽丝和鲍勃遇见魔术师‘干扰者吉姆’，”埃克斯坦描述道，“魔术师宣称：‘我有两个球，一白一黑。’”

这两个球代表一对纠缠粒子。纠缠粒子的特性存在关联：若测量发现第一个粒子自旋向上，另一个必然自旋向下，反之亦然。即使两个粒子相隔宇宙两端，这种关联依然成立。在故事中，球的颜色形成关联：若一球为白，另一球必为黑。

遵循经典魔术套路，吉姆让观众亲眼见证两个球被放入盒子，经过摇晃后分别交给爱丽丝和鲍勃。此时无人知晓每个盒中球的颜色。

随后爱丽丝与鲍勃乘坐火箭以近光速反向飞行。一段时间后，两人同时打开盒子。但在此期间，吉姆已施展魔术改变了球的特性。

起初双方都未察觉异常。每个人都预期看到白球或黑球的概率各半，开盒后也确实看到某种颜色。吉姆的干预无法改变这个事实。

然而当两人重返地球比对结果时，魔术戏法终被揭穿：他们发现两个球的颜色竟然相同。吉姆成功改变了纠缠关联的本质——从颜色相反转变为颜色一致。

这虽是简化模型，实际量子干扰过程更为复杂。

20世纪90年代中期，雅各布·格伦豪斯、桑杜·波佩斯库与丹尼尔·罗尔利希曾探索：在遵守爱因斯坦核心原理（信息无法超光速传递）的前提下，理论能在多大程度上突破量子力学框架？爱因斯坦的中期思想实验表明，若违反“无信号传输”原则，因果概念本身将开始瓦解。此后，该原则成为物理学家探索量子力学之外可能理论的核心前提。“研究量子基础时，我们极其重视无信号传输原则。”法国国家信息与自动化研究所的米尔亚姆·维莱曼强调。

三位研究者将干扰设想为某种能影响纠缠粒子的“超纠缠”形态。正如测量设备能决定远处纠缠粒子的状态，假想的干扰装置也能改变遥远纠缠粒子对之间的关联特性。部分物理学家认为，若这种干扰过程遵守关键规则，就能在不破坏因果律的前提下隐秘地瓦解量子纠缠。

量子干扰的概念如此奇特，以至于最初物理学家不知如何应对。“我们写完那篇论文后，研究就停滞了。”波佩斯库回忆道。

因果律

二十年后，深入探索的时机终于成熟。

随着量子计算机从理论构想走向现实实验，量子密码学也蓬勃发展。21世纪最初十年，多个团队开发出“设备无关量子密钥分发”技术，这种量子密码方案完全依赖纠缠独占性原理。

2016年，拉马纳坦与帕韦乌·霍罗代茨基研究这些协议时，偶然发现了格伦豪斯等人的论文。“我们逐渐意识到，一旦允许这类干扰关联存在，整个设备无关密码学所依赖的纠缠独占性将彻底失效。”拉马纳坦指出。

干扰现象很快引发激烈讨论。许多研究者认为该思想实验遗漏了关键要素：虽然干扰不能用于超光速传信，但影响远处量子粒子状态的行为，依然类似当年困扰爱因斯坦的“鬼魅般的超距作用”。

然而对某些研究者而言，量子干扰引发的理论不适感正催生新思想。“我将它视为打磨因果定义直觉的工具。”罗杰·科尔贝克表示，他在2006年的博士论文中率先提出了设备无关密码协议方案。

现任教于伦敦国王学院的科尔贝克，正与格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学研究所的V·维拉萨尼合作，致力于对不同理论中的因果作用模式进行分类。对他们而言，干扰现象恰是绝佳的边缘案例。他们正在寻找类似无信号传输原则的基础原理，以阐明干扰行为究竟突破了哪些规则。

拉马纳坦团队与霍罗代茨基团队针对这项研究，连同维莱曼近期发表的论文，于2025年12月与埃克斯坦、托马什·米勒及帕韦乌的父亲雷沙德·霍罗代茨基共同撰写预印本作出回应。目前研究者们正持续对话，致力于厘清术语、消除误解，探寻物理理论背后的根本原理。

“这对我来说是最有趣的问题，”埃克斯坦说，“其背后是否存在新物理学？物理理论能否容纳这类现象？”

英文来源：

Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature
Introduction
For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent years developing new codes that appear to be safe from future safecrackers armed with quantum computers.
At the same time, they’ve also devised ingenious ways to use the rules of quantum mechanics to keep communications secure. But quantum mechanics, just like the “classical” mechanics that preceded it, is just a theory of nature. What if it eventually gets superseded by a fuller theory, just as quantum mechanics supplanted Newtonian physics a century ago? Will these quantum communication techniques still be secure in a world where there’s an even more fundamental set of rules?
“In terms of these cryptographic protocols, it’s good to be paranoid,” said Ravishankar Ramanathan, a quantum information theorist at the University of Hong Kong who works on quantum cryptography. “Let’s try to minimize the assumptions behind the protocol. Let’s suppose that at some future date people realize that quantum mechanics is not the ultimate theory of nature.”
It’s a possibility worth considering. The difficulty of outstanding problems — like reconciling quantum mechanics and gravity — suggests that a post-quantum theory of nature might involve something quite unexpected.
To guard against the possibility that their protocols are based on faulty assumptions, some quantum cryptographers search for even more basic principles to build upon. Instead of starting from quantum mechanics, they dig deeper, down to the very concept of causality.
A Subtle Sabotage
One way to understand developments in this area is to consider quantum key distribution, which involves taking advantage of the rules of quantum mechanics to pass along a key — something that can be used to decode a secret message — in a way that cannot be covertly tampered with. Quantum key distribution makes use of quantum entanglement, which locks two particles together through one of their properties, like spin. Quantum entanglement contains something of a trip wire. If anyone tries to mess with the entanglement — as they would if they tried to steal the key — the intrusion will destroy the entanglement, revealing the sabotage. This is because of a fundamental quantum mechanical principle called the “monogamy of entanglement.”
But what if this principle no longer held? In such a case, if the people passing the message did not have complete control of their devices, an outsider could potentially subtly change the particles’ entanglement, disrupting the communication without leaving a trace.
This process is called quantum jamming, and efforts to understand it have surged in recent years.
For many scientists, jamming is appealing because it can help them better understand both quantum mechanics and the nature of cause and effect. They wonder: Are there deep principles that forbid jamming, that make it impossible? Or, if no principle forbids it, could jamming occur in the real world?
Jim the Jammer
Michał Eckstein, a theoretical physicist at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, likes to illustrate jamming with a story. Its protagonists are the classic characters from explanations of quantum mechanics, Alice and Bob.
“Suppose you have Alice and Bob, and they meet a magician, Jim the Jammer,” Eckstein said. “The magician says, ‘I have two balls; one is white, and one is black.’”
The balls stand in for a pair of entangled particles. If two particles are entangled, they have a property that is linked in some way — if you measure the first particle and find that its spin is up, for example, the other particle’s spin will inevitably be down, and vice versa. This holds true even if the other particle is halfway across the universe. Here the balls are linked such that if one is white, the other will always be black.
In the classic trope of stage magic, Jim lets members of the audience see the balls get placed into two boxes, mixed up, and given to Alice and Bob. No one, at this point, knows which ball is in which box.
Then Alice and Bob get into rocket ships that fly off in opposite directions at close to the speed of light. After a while, Alice opens her box, and Bob opens his. But in the meantime, Jim has performed a trick, and the balls have changed.
At first, neither Alice nor Bob notices Jim’s interference. Each expects to have a 50% chance of seeing a white or black ball, and when each opens up their box, the ball is either white or black. Nothing Jim does can change that.
When Alice and Bob meet back on Earth, though, the magician’s trick is revealed. When Alice and Bob compare their measurements, they find that the balls are the same color. Jim has shifted the nature of the balls’ entanglement — from being opposite colors to being perfect matches.
That’s the basic idea, though in reality the process of quantum jamming is a little more complicated.
In the mid-1990s, Jacob Grunhaus, Sandu Popescu, and Daniel Rohrlich were exploring just how far a theory could go beyond the rules of quantum mechanics while still respecting a core principle of Einstein’s: You can’t send information faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s mid-century thought experiments showed that without this “no-signaling” principle, the very notion of cause and effect would start to fray. Since then, the no-signaling principle has become a core assumption when physicists consider what might lie beyond quantum mechanics. “When we work in quantum foundations, what we take very seriously is the no-signaling principle,” said Mirjam Weilenmann of the French national research institute Inria.
Grunhaus, Popescu, and Rohrlich imagined jamming as a kind of super-entanglement that could interfere with entangled particles. Just as you could use a measuring device to determine the fate of a distant entangled particle, you could use a hypothetical jamming device to change the correlation between a pair of distant entangled particles. If this jamming procedure obeyed a few key rules, some physicists argue, it would secretly disrupt quantum entanglement without disrupting causality.
The idea of quantum jamming is so strange that initially physicists didn’t know quite what to do with it. “We wrote that paper and that was the end of it,” Popescu said.
Cause and Effect
Twenty years later, the time was right to explore it further.
Quantum cryptography had grown, as quantum computers went from theoretical ideas to experiments in the real world. In the first decade of the 2000s, several groups developed device-independent quantum key distribution, a quantum cryptography procedure that depends on the monogamy of entanglement.
In 2016, Ramanathan and Paweł Horodecki were thinking about these protocols when they found the paper by Grunhaus, Popescu, and Rohrlich. “We started to realize that this property of monogamy, upon which all of device-independent cryptography is based, completely fails once you start to allow these types of jamming correlations,” Ramanathan said.
Soon, jamming was the subject of vigorous discussion. Many researchers felt the thought experiment was missing something important: While jamming can’t be used to send signals faster than light, influencing the state of a distant quantum particle still feels like the kind of “spooky action at a distance” that long ago tormented Einstein.
But for some researchers, the discomfort that quantum jamming creates is inspiring new ideas. “I see it as a tool to try to help hone our intuitions of what the right definition of causation is,” said Roger Colbeck, who proposed one of the first protocols for device-independent cryptography in his 2006 doctoral thesis.
Now at King’s College London, Colbeck is working with V. Vilasini at Inria research center at the University of Grenoble Alpes to classify the way cause and effect work in different theories. For them, jamming serves as a useful edge case. They’re seeking another fundamental principle, like the no-signaling principle, that explains which rules jamming breaks.
The groups of Ramanathan and Horodecki responded to this work, as well as a recent paper by Weilenmann, in a preprint in December 2025 that they wrote with Eckstein, Tomasz Miller, and Paweł Horodecki’s father, Ryszard. Now, the researchers are in conversation, trying to clarify terms, fix misunderstandings, and look for the fundamental principles behind physical theories.
“That’s for me the most interesting question,” Eckstein said. “Is there any new physics behind it? Can physics include such phenomena?”