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Scientists Teleport Information Between Ions a Meter Apart
erickhill writes with word that scientists from the University of Maryland have successfully transferred information from one charged atom to another without having it cross the intervening space of about one meter. The academic paper is available in the journal Science, though it requires a subscription to see more than the abstract.
Scientists have previously teleported unmolested qubits between photons of light, and between photons and clouds of atoms. But researchers have long sought to teleport qubits between distant atoms. Light's high speed of travel makes photons good transporters of information, but for storing quantum information, atoms are a much better choice because they're easier to hold on to. 'This is a big deal,' comments Myungshik Kim, a quantum physicist at Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom. 'To store information as it is in quantum form, you have to have a teleportation scheme available between two stationary qubits. Then you can store them and manipulate them later on.'"
All sources regarding quantum entanglement/teleportation are quite adamant that you can't use it to actually send information instantaneously. Despite there being "spooky action at a distance", any discernible information had to be transfered when you separated the photons themselves at sub-light speeds. In this case it would be atoms, but I assume it still applies? The article lists applications as super-fast quantum computers (I guess any functional quantum computer could be considered fast at what it does) and quantum encryption (a real application I've heard applied to quantum teleportation, though the encrypted data itself still has to travel at c or less).
So, am I right, and this is basically the same ol' non-instant-communication but still quite cool kinda teleportation, only using atoms instead of photons? I'm just checking.
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Actually, yes, necessarily: it is ytterbium.
Bell's theorem (which is a logical argument) and common sense (which we base logical arguments upon) are at odds. So the physicists side with "spooky action at a distance" because it's more phun. They've been taking the "magic" path ever since Einstein and relativity came along and said reality is unintuitive (which it is, but it follows from his assumptions which were based on observation). Witness "dark matter" and "dark energy" and "string theory".
Back to the topic at hand, no one can explain what is different about a particle whose wave function has "collapsed" and one that hasn't. If you can tell the difference, then you can use entangled pairs to communicate instantly at a distance. One person makes a measurement or not, and the other guy checks for the collapsed-ness of his particle - instant transmission. But since no one knows what the collapse means we just chalk it all up as magic - or unknowable, or parallel universes, etc... By the way, the collapsedness of the particles wave function is therefore a hidden variable that we don't have access to. This proves the existence of hidden variables in contradiction to Bell's theorem, and offers the distinct possibility that the spin is also there all along as a "hidden variable".
I thus predict that an overturn of at least one assumption in Bell's theorem will be one of the biggest headlines in physics some time this century.