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Austrian Physicists 'Teleport' Light Over 600m
openSoar writes "The BBC is reporting that: 'Physicists have carried out successful teleportation with particles of light over a distance of 600m across the River Danube in Austria. When physicists say 'teleportation', they are describing the transfer of key properties from one particle to another without a physical link.'"
Haven't we learned anything from Half-Life or Doom? Teleportaion can only lead to some race trying to enslave humans. Ya, science is soooooo great.
"The researchers were able to teleport three distinct polarisation states between Alice and Bob via the fibre-optic cable through the tunnel. The process is not instantaneous as it is limited by the speed of light."
Doesn't sound like teleporting to me so much as uploading.
Then again, I'm just grasping at straws hoping to get Canada its first gold medal in first non-anonymous post to have quoted an article done by a member without a Slashdot subscription.
I'll settle for silver. :(
What they did NOT do is teleport particles of light. That just makes no sense. Light was used as the means of conveying the information used to teleport the quantum properties from one particle to another, without the particle having to travel.
By the way, the reason this is called "teleportation" is that the particle effectively travels at the speed of light -- its properties can be transferred by light. If this could be applied to humans, for example, it would allow for light-speed travel, without all the nuisances of acceleration. It should be noted that this does NOT violate the universal speed limit.
Oh, and before someone asks, this is entirely different from quantum tunnelling....
Err, there was a fibre link, ie a physical link. RTFA submitter?
My email addy? should be easy enough.
I decided to do a little googling instead:
How this relates to quantum computing:
When a single photon is split by a beam splitter, its two `halves' can entangle two distant atoms into an EPR pair.
How to entangle a photon pair: There are certain nonlinear (BBO) crystals, such as are used in optical parametric oscillators, that will supply entangles photon pairs.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Could the article have it wrong? Perhaps they misunderstood the scientists. The photons move at the speed of light, but the entanglement effect ought to be instantaneous since from one way of thinking the distant photon was already in the same state as the input photon.
Play Command HQ online
don't know about you guys but i like the idea of teleportation
:) imagine that you could order food over teleportation :)
:)
:)
... cause people are so scared that their soul might get lost ... maybe we should start testing with microsoft workers ? *grin* :)
we probably can't even imagine what would happen if people could finally get teleportation to work so it could teleport every kind of items, spaceprograms surely would have a great benefit from it, also every kind of transportation companies, except maybe bikecabs
althrough from the scientific point of view, this will be a huge effort even to get a single atom teleported from one place to another. teleporting light is a great start thou
ordering stuff from thinkgeek in the speed of light sounds pretty exciting
the question about teleporting living things will be a tabu for quite a while i'm affraid
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
You move an arm and your 'puppet' moves an arm, instantly. The difference being that arm could be up to 600m away connecting by a fibre optic cable... now if we could get rid of the cabling requirement and the distance limit we'd get teleportation... uh.. puppetry. I'd like to see this happen reliably on a cellular level, before I hop onto a transporter...
I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords...
As long as I get to telefrag my boss, they can do anything they damn well want with Earth!
The idea of teleportation is a scary one...
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to find the US/Halliburton Army using satellite teleportation to move machinery into your backyard in their global search for oil...
Teleportion will certainly have its pros and cons... and like all other technologies, its uses will be both beneficial and detrimental... think of its implications in drug trafiking... amongst other things...
Cloning! OMG they've cloned light. Hopefully the US Gov't won't make it illegal.
..........FULL STOP.
Wow, those are two very scary prospects. Halliburton might show up in your back yard LOOKING 4 OIL!1!111 OMFG!!!!1! It isn't like the US military couldn't show up in anyone's backyard at any moment because, you know, they are a super power and could probably crush all the worlds militaries combined. But boy oh boy, with this new teleportation stuff they could show up in France and totally demand oil, and France would be like "WTF we surrender". And the US would be like "we don't want you to surrender, we just want your oil to run our e\/il corporations with corporate death squads". And France would be like "WTF, we surrender". Then the Italians would be like "we were on France's side, but we are first surrendering then switching sides and are now on the side of the US." And the US would be like "OMFG Italy, you guys r gay, give us your oil too." And Italy would be like, "Okay." And I would be like "OMFG teleportation sucks. No blood for oil! No blood for oil!!!11!!!"
And then the college aged kids could get their weed quicker, because clearly the war on drugs has almost eliminated drugs from the streets. Just the other day I was out looking for crack and this guy was like "Sorry man, we lost the war on drugs. Just the other day we surrendered. You can no longer get crack on the street ever again." and I was like "fuck. I wanted crack, but the government won the war on drugs." Then teleportation would come and I would be like "Kick ass, I can get drugs sent right to my home." Then I would smoke a lot of pot AND GO INSANE AND KILL SOMEOEN !!!!11!!!!1!! Because pot totally kills people. Just the other day I saw someone overdose on pot. He totally died.
So I guess what I am saying is that those slopes sure are slippery, it is a good thing you are hear to guide us through the potential problems with teleportation. Drugs and Halliburton/EVIL CORPOTATE DEATH SQUAD/US military sure are scary.
One interesting point to note is that, if it were possible to transport a person via this process, the trip would appear to be instantaneous. Although travel would occur at the speed of light, no time would appear to pass for the traveller. Cool.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the latency between Earth and Mars rover could be eliminated? No more troublesome autonomous machines needed, just use remote control. Unless of course a fiber optic cable is a requirement - I don't see any fiber optic cables of that length being produced anytime soon.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
rsync at the speed of light. ;)
:D
I could find some uses for that. My brother in law would like to rsync music collections for backup purposes for example.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
It's really more than that, because you have to remember that each photon is neither fully in one state or the other. It is a combination of the two. This is "quantum superposition", or the concept that a particle is really a manifestation of discrete possibilities.
I think a good example of what is really happening is to imagine a pair of dice guaranteed by nature always to roll a 7. If you see a "3" on one die, then there absolutely must be a "4" on the other. Anything else would be a violation of several fundamental laws. Now imagine taking the two dice and seperating them by a large distance, and then rolling one of the dice. Even though there is a large distance, and even though the speed of light is the limit at which information may be sent, the other die will show the other number pair when measured. (Debate about whether one measurement happens before another is meaningless due to special relativity. In other words, one measurement cannot cause another to be so.) So if you roll a 3, the other die will roll (or has rolled) a 4. If you happen to roll a 1, then the other die will roll (has rolled) a 6. Spooky, huh? Welcome to the crazy world of quantum mechanics! Just when you thought you understood it all, nature throws a curveball.
Now your first instinct is that somehow those dice decided on something befor they were seperated. This is not how quantum mechanics works. The two particles can't "decide" on anything until measurement. Every observation and every calculation tells you that the particles did not decide on a specific state beforehand. I could show you why this is so, but it's pretty complicated and involves higher level mathematics than the average slashdot reader can understand. If you're really interested, I suggest reading a QM textbook. They keep this topic in one of the last chapters, so you have a lot of studying ahead of you.
Finally, your next reaction is going to be, "Wow, we can communicate at speeds faster than the speed of light!" Unfortunately, the way this works you can't "force" the particle to a particular state. If the particle comes in with a preference for one state or the other, then the complement will be true for the other particle. (By preference, I mean the chance of one state is 90%, and the other is 10%, or 99.99% and 0.01%, not something pre-decided. See the above paragraph.) And thanks to special relativity, it is fruitless to try and decide whether one measurement occured before or after another, so a causality link cannot be established.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Heh,
you should make a "end of ze world" like animation.
Piss someone off at work.
:P
Does the word 'telefrag' mean anything to you?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
> When physicists say 'teleportation', they are describing the transfer of key properties from one particle to another without a physical link.
So some morning when you wake up with a suddenly teeny weenie, you'll know you've been had by a physicist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Since, obviously, you are not actually teleporting the photon itself, but rather its properties. Why can't we use this as a sort of limitless instantaneous data transfer method?
I.E. Use the manipulation of these properties to single a sort of photonic 1's and 0's (or potentially much more, possibly instead of binary, it might be possible to make it trinary, or better).
Think about it, you put a pack of these entangled photons into a sort of "storage" device, stick it on your next mars rover, and instead of there being a huge delay, your commands are sent instantaneously. Obviously eventually these entangled photons would be all used up (or could you continue to modify them after the first time?) but still, rovers, for example, are a consumable at this point too.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
No, the communications would still go at the speed of light. this is non-negotiable.
... of course, it'd be hard to get them in the right order...
Also, I don't think reusable particles would be a problem, if you had a gram or so of entangled helium or something, that'd be about 10^20 bits
Reusing the particles is also non-negotiable. Once disentangled, only touching the particles together again in a specific manner would entangle them.
Note: when I say non-negotiable, I mean it. It is not possible. At all. In any way. It's not a very small non-zero probability, it's a probability of Precisely Zero. With infinite zeros after it. Ok?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Ohh, I'm sorry. On appeal you don't get to go onto the medal round.
But at least it's a personal best. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.