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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.
Let's all hope that this knowledge can be used for a noble cause one day.
Like shaving a few milliseconds off the telecoms links between international stock-exchanges, allowing fortunes to be made for the lucky few via arbitrage!
Wow ... just one step closer towards man's ultimate dream of being able to teleport small viruses.
i could live a little longer in this prison
From single photons, to complete atoms, to complete molecules, to a proof of concept on something that could be called alive (or at least working enough to be able to reproduce in the right environment). Each one of those steps are pretty big jumps in complexity, that may bring their own showstoppers to the party. But probably will give hard numbers to the real impossibility of teleporting humans.
Why is the mention of teleporting a virus immediately taken as something bad? I read it and immediately took it to be the next step beyond a simple molecule - a virus can be not much larger than a molecule, but at the same time can be many times more complex and would also demonstrate
that teleportation wouldn't have any adverse effects on such things as DNA or RNA strands.
Basically, a virus is the step between a simple molecule and an actual living organism.
To me it would be the logical step after molecules.
Here's an example of such "Interesting" photography.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
Having detectors for the many different properties of the photon, rather than just "IS/isNOT entangled", (which is why there needs to be many CCDs with a single aperture), could reveal a wealth of information about a photographed object.
The point of teleporting a virus is to see if you can teleport a (nearly) living organism and have it remain viable. It's the obvious next step after molecule and before bacteria or Donald Trump.
Just because half the world is freaking out over ebola doesn't mean viruses wouldn't be an obvious thing to try or that we should avoid mentioning them.
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).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
this research is not what it purports to be...it's not like a "transporter" in Star Trek at all
TFS was actually doing pretty well until the last few sentences. What is being "telepored" are "quantum properties", which are nothing at all like classical properties and which are certainly unrelated to "objects".
The process is "quantum" in the sense that the information is hidden behind the quantum veil of the carrier wave. There is more to quantum phenomena than non-locality, although non-locality is one of the more spectacular ways it manifests.
Quantum "teleportation" happens to properties. Imagine you have a house of indeterminate colour, and a "colour teleporter" that consists of a beam of light between your house and another house a few miles away that will carry that colour of that house to your house. You turn the "teleporter" on, wait for the beam of light to establish itself, your confederate at the other end aims the "teleporter" at the first house, and your house becomes the colour of the first house at a time L/c later, where L is the distance the light has to travel and c is a well known constant.
This is a pretty close analogy to what is happening during "quantum teleportation"--and remember, if you stick you hand in the space the information is being "teleported" through you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary laser beam that is used to carrying the information.
To leap from this "colour teleoportation" to the claim that "scientists teleported a house from one neighbourhood to the next" would be clearly and egregiously false, yet that is what discussions of quantum "teleportation" always end up with: people talking as if photons, atoms, molecules and viruses are being carried through space and reconstructed at the other end.
To see how wrong this is, consider a case where there is actual teleportation vs quantum "teleportation" of an electron to the Moon. In the case of actual teleportation, an important quantum number changes: the count of electrons on the Moon. In the case of quantum "teleportation" the Moon's electron number stays exactly the same. So the two final quantum states are completely different in these two cases. The processes have nothing to do with each other and it is misleading and wrong to talk about them as if they do.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If you can teleport something as large as a virus then you can probably also fiddle with the data in between and are probably a substantial way toward arbitrarily assembling various forms of matter (i.e. molecular assembly), at which point you basically have a 3D printer from start treck.
The spin of a photon is a boson is always 1. That's not too hard to transmit. Approximately 0 bits are needed. Furthermore, the momentum of a photon is always h\nu, with \nu the frequency. So if you know the frequency of a photon, you also know its momentum, with another 0 bit to transmit. Finally I don't think a photon can have an orbital quantum momentum. Electrons can have those. That is unless things have changed since I last took a class on quantum mechanics.
In other words the summary is the worst I've seen in a long time.
Yeah. What goombah99 said.