First Teleportation of Multiple Quantum Properties of a Single Photon

KentuckyFC writes Photons have many properties, such as their frequency, momentum, spin and orbital angular momentum. But when it comes to quantum teleportation, physicists have only ever been able to to transmit one of these properties at a time. So the possibility of teleporting a complete quantum object has always seemed a distant dream. Now a team of Chinese physicists has worked out how to teleport more than one quantum property. The team has demonstrated it by teleporting both the spin and orbital angular momentum of single photons simultaneously. They point out that there is no reason in principle why the technique cannot be generalized to include other properties as well, such as a photon's frequency, momentum and so on. That's an important step towards teleporting complex quantum objects in their entirety, such as atoms, molecules and perhaps even small viruses.

Comments

Skeptical about orbital angularmomentum in photons

[goombah99]

It can exist, but virtually every paper I've ever read, especially any that mention optical vorticies confuses Orbital Angular momentum with simple minded othogonal function decompositions of spatial light patterns. Any spatial pattern including this printed page can be written in terms of legendre polynomials or YLMs but that in itself does not give it orbital angular momentum quantum numbers. That's a whole nother ball of wax. To understand the latter you have to puzzle out why you think a half-wave plate (a circular polarizer) is a linear device that doesn't change the frequency of the photon. (after all, for every reversal of polarization, the earth or whatever the device is attached to has to accelerate to absorb the equal and opposite polarization).