Nina's Blog - Tuesday 1st April 2025

CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep

The findings could help to explain the species’ fascinating flocking behaviour
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It is well known that sheep behave like particles: their stochastic behaviour has been studied by zoologists and physicists alike, who noticed that a flock’s ability to quickly change phase is similar to that of atoms in a solid and a liquid. Known as the Lamb Shift,
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“The fact that we were having our lunch next to the flock was a shear coincidence,” says Mary Little, leader of the HERD collaboration, describing how the project came about. “When we saw and herd their behaviour, we wanted to investigate the movement of the flock using the technology at our disposal at the Laboratory.”
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Dubbed “moutons” and represented by the Greek letter lambda, l, these particles are leptons and are close relatives of the muon, but fluffier.
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“More research is needed to fully confirm that this was indeed an observation of ovine entanglement or a statistical fluctuation,” says Ewen Woolly, spokesperson for the HERD collaboration. “This may be difficult, as we have found that the research makes physicists become inexplicably drowsy.”
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Theoretical physicist John Ellis, pioneer of the penguin diagram, with its updated sheep version. Scientists at CERN find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep in 2025, the year declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. (Image: CERN)