Kraków's J-PET Group and 21 Co-Authors Publish a Roadmap for Quantum Entanglement PET: What arXiv 2607.12182 and the June 2026 First-in-Human Scan Show
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Every PET scan starts with a positron meeting an electron inside the patient. The two annihilate and send out a pair of gamma photons in opposite directions, and the scanner finds the tracer by catching both photons at once. Those photon pairs also carry a quantum property that no clinical scanner reads today: their polarizations are entangled. A group of physicists and imaging engineers now argues that this unused signal could sharpen PET images and add new diagnostic readings.
Their case is set out in "Roadmap Towards Quantum Entanglement Positron Emission Tomography (QE-PET)" (arXiv 2607.12182), posted on 13 July 2026 by 22 authors led by Paweł Moskal of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, with teams from the University of California Santa Cruz, IIT Bombay, the University of Tokyo, the University of Sydney, the University of Zagreb, Japan's National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology and others. The roadmap surveys how quantum entanglement PET could be built, from the plastic-scintillator J-PET scanner in Kraków to crystal, semiconductor and Compton-camera designs. It also describes a new candidate biomarker, the degree of quantum entanglement of the photon pair, which may depend on the tissue in which the positron annihilated.
Two experimental findings from the past three years made the idea worth pursuing. In 2023 an experiment showed that the quantum correlation between the two photons survives when one of them scatters off an electron, which most physicists had expected to destroy it. In 2025 the Kraków group reported in Science Advances that photons from annihilation in matter are less than maximally entangled, and that the degree of entanglement depends on how the annihilation happened. If that dependence tracks the chemistry of tissue, such as oxygen content, a scanner could read it as a new measurement alongside the usual tracer uptake.
A companion preprint makes the idea concrete. On 28 June 2026 the Kraków team and colleagues posted "First-in-human quantum entanglement imaging" (arXiv 2606.29421), reporting that the J-PET scanner produced, in one patient, both an image of a gallium-68 DOTA-TATE tracer and, from the same research acquisition, an image of the degree of entanglement. The roadmap reads that scan as a start. The authors state plainly that whether entanglement-based imaging and pH mapping can reach clinical practice "remains an open question."