IBM scientists predict this discovery will open up a rush of new developments around sensors, switches and thermoelectric coolers or energy-harvesting devices, for improved power consumption.

A review of three separate experiments has turned up "remarkably similar" results, pointing to what researchers say is a strong possibility that we've found hits of a phenomenon that goes beyond the standard model of particle physics. 

When taken together, data from experiments conducted in the US, Switzerland, and Japan, have yielded a result with 99.95 percent certainty that lepton universality - a fundamental assumption of the standard model - does not hold up.

"These studies have resulted in observations that seem to challenge lepton universality," an international team of physicists reports.

Scientists investigating how light particles (or photons) experience entanglement on the quantum scale have discovered something entirely unexpected, and it challenges long-held assumptions about the initial moments of what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance".

When the team created entangled pairs of photons, these particles didn't originate in the same place and break away as predicted - they emerged from entirely different points in space, which means quantum theory might have to account for a whole lot more randomness than we thought.