Photon Pair Coupled in Glass Fiber

Trachman writes: Austrian scientists have discovered a way to couple photon pairs. When two identical photons are coupled and the phase of one is changed, then thanks to the magic of quantum mechanics, the phase of the other photon also changes (abstract). Scientists predict this can advance quantum optics and quantum computations, taking us a step closer to having data transmissions secure from the nosy agencies of the world.

If any of you have expertise in this area, could you share your thoughts on the essence of this discovery and its associated potential practical applications?

Comments

Naive optimism in headline

[rogoshen1]

Step 1. invent new process that *potentially* could thwart nosy droppers of eaves
Step 2. Process is so expensive and difficult to implement, said agencies are likely to be the only users.
Step 3. Post to slashdot.

People need to wake up and realize that privacy is dead, and ubiquitous violations of personal privacy will soon become the norm.

Your grandchildren will think you a bit 'off' for being of the opinion that privacy is a good thing.

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[gweihir]

Actually, it is even worse: "quantum modulation" is complete BS as networking technology and cannot scale to any real-world WAN networking, except on dedicated links. Why this nonsense gets touted every time is a mystery to me. In addition, what was done so far on dedicated links got broken. It is also not needed at all, as it is so slow that all you do with it is transfer a symmetric encryption key and then you use a conventional VPN. The key exchange is not a vulnerable part of a VPN link, at least if done right. So, in practice, this stuff does not scale, cannot be routed and is not increasing security anyways.

As to privacy being dead, that is a completely unrelated issue, and it is untrue. Strong encryption works. You do have to use it and you do need to invest at least a few days to find out how to use it right, this is not a "single click" problem. (Well, almost nothing is a "single click" problem, but people are stupid and believe the defective things they get delivered as "single click" would actually be beneficial.)

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[umghhh]

we all made a conscious decision on that? I must have missed that somehow. Privacy is not dead. There is always something that can be done to ensure good enough level of privacy that also allows good enough chances to catch criminals. The current violations of privacy are not used to do even that but serve the powers that be. And that needs to change.

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[qwijibo]

We don't get to decide. There are no serious privacy oriented options left in the marketplace. Privacy is about as hopeless as buying stuff not-made-in-China.

However, if you find that to be offensive, feel free to create misleading information to poison the various databases about you. The nice thing about companies collecting and reselling information about everyone is that they're so gullible. Just be reasonable enough that the new data doesn't get flagged and omitted. If you're a "Fry Technician" at a Fortune 500 company's franchisee, you may want more than one hop between now and your aspiring Bruce Wayne persona.

Depending on how much free time you have, or how much you just like to game the system, you can do things from provide grossly inaccurate income information to those that ask, to having one or more businesses (or hobbies looking like businesses), or creating new people. The easiest, legal way to create fictitious people is "authorized users" on a corporate credit card account. Anyone willing to pay a yearly fee can open a corporate account, then add anyone they want with little more than a name. As long as you use your fake people for legitimate transactions and pay your bills, there's nothing illegal about it.

Back on topic, hopefully developments like this can later be turned into more secure communication technologies that can be used after the advertising&data-merchant economy collapses.

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[flyneye]

How does a couple screw in a light bulb?
First you have to shrink them down and get them inside....
Got no clue about coupling in a fiber strand...

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[Jarik C-Bol]

There needs to be a moderation tag for "Sad but True."

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[Rei]

Here's how collapse of the waveform works. If you take a measurement, you will get a value.

1. The value you get is completely random to you.
2. You cannot in any way choose the value.
3. You cannot know, by reading it, if anyone else has already collapsed the waveform, or if the value you're getting is new.
4. If someone does collapse the waveform, however, when the other side tries to measure it, they'll get the same value - instantaneously.

The problem with trying to use this as some sort of instantaneous information teleportation system is that while it is instantaneous, it's not sending information. Your reading it does not give any information to the other side. You don't choose the value and they can't tell that you've read it. All they get is random noise.

It is, however, potentially valuable for cryptography, in that you can simultaneously generate the same one-time pad in two locations without any snoopable channel, which you can then use to encode or decode data. The data still has to be sent by conventional means - as mentioned above, you're not sending any information by measuring quantum states, the other side has no clue what you've done or not done - but the pad itself is perfectly random and unsnoopable.

Re:Naive optimism in headline

[Tyr07]

it goes to voicemail? You realize that voicemail on cellphones isn't built into the bloody phone right? It's from your provider.
Just the same as my voice calls can be tapped so can my voice mail, but a reasonable level of privacy is there unless I'm investigated.

And no I don't. This may be a hard concept for you as you're probably a bit younger than I am, but people do not need to be able to talk to me at all times of the day no matter where I am. 99.99% of the time it is never an emergency that I really wished I got that phone call.

You know, once upon a time, people didn't have cell phones, just regular ones. When you called, they were simply 'not home' and you had to wait until they called you back, or you had to just try again another time when you think they might be home.

News for nerds!?!

[pegdhcp]

For some reason I was not compelled to pay 30+ USD for a seemingly very important paper, describing the future scientific base of (quasi ?) secure communications.

Re:News for nerds!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1860.pdf

The Summary is Wrong: Photon AND Gate?

[blavallee]

According to the article, "When both hit the resonator at the same time, both of them together experience a phase shift by 180 degrees."
It's not advancement in quantum communications, it's an advancement in quantum computation.

The potential practical application... it resembles an AND logic gate function, with photons!

It's an efficient photonic switch.

[mrthoughtful]

What it 'means' is that we are a step closer to optical switching - i.e., optical computers.

The important aspect of the work, as I see it, is that the switch is activated optically also, and the complexity of the switch is low (allowing it to be manufactured easily).

However, I'm no expert in the field. I just read the article, and am geek enough to read /.

Media and the Copenhagen interpretation

[amaurea]

Only 42% of quantum physicisists would agree with the statement in the summary that "When two identical photons are coupled and the phase of one is changed, then thanks to the magic of quantum mechanics, the phase of the other photon also changes", and 40% of them would actively disagree. While the mathematics and measurement predictions of quantum mechanics is quite uncontroversial, the interpretation beyond that is a topic of much debate (much of which belongs in philosopy rather than physics).

The summary is using one such metaphysical interpretation, called the Copenhagen interpretation, which has more "magic" than most (spooky, faster-than-light action at a distance; wavefunctions that collapse when I, the Observer, looks at them, but not when anyone else does), and might be the most confusing one to the public (though admittedly, all the interpretations are confusing to some extent).

Re:Media and the Copenhagen interpretation

[__aaltlg1547]

That's the 'hidden variables' question, and currently there's no way to answer it.

However the 'spooky action at a distance' handwavery explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation is not an indispensible part of the Copenhagen interpretation. One can simply observe that when one of a pair of entangled particles is measured, the state of the entangled particle is logically constrained rather than teleported to its position. And the "measured" portion can be dispensed with as well if you understand that there is zero difference between being measured by experimental apparatus and interacting with another particle so as to change its quantum state. This removes the spooky aspect of privileging the Experimenter. The experimenter is no diifferent from any other nonempty set of fermions, aside from being more complicated than many.

Re:Media and the Copenhagen interpretation

[amaurea]

I think it is important to distinguish between three things here. The theory (the equations and predictions of measurements), our interpretations of the theory (what picture of the world we associate with the theory), and the real world itself.

For example, let's say that you need a theory for describing how a hypothetical time-ray works. The observed effect is that physical processes of whatever it is shot at occur at twice the rate as before compared to the rest of the world. This is straightforward to measure and can be modeled exactly using equations. But how should we interpret what happens? One interpretation is that the time-ray speeds up the passing of time for the object it hits. But another, equivalent interpretation is that the ray slows down the passing of time for the entire rest of the world, and protects only the target object from the effect. These interpretations both lead to the same observations, since all we can observe are the *relative* rate of events, but they make different claims about what actually happens. In this case one interpretation is clearly more appealing because it is simpler, but no experiment could distinguish between them. So in some sense the distinction is meaningless.

Similarly, the theory of general relativity, which is our modern description of gravity, can be interpreted as spacetime being curved by the presence of energy, and the curvature affecting the paths of objects. But it is also possible to interpret it as spacetime being flat, but filled with a field of self-interacting, massless, spin-2 particles (gravitons). Both these pictures lead to the same predictions, so in that sense they are the same theory. But they are clearly very different descriptions of reality.

The point of making the distinction between theory and interpretation is that the former can be tested, while the latter can't. The theory of general relativity has been put through a huge number of tests, and it has held up under all of them. Like most theories of fundamental physics it has been tested to exquisite precision, and if it is wrong, it has to be wrong in a very subtle way. But the interpretation of general relativity can't be tested at all. Which one to use is a bit like choosing whether to use a cartesian or polar coordinate system in maths. One might be easier to use or prettier in some situations, but they give exactly the same results.

The same applies to quantum physics to perhaps an even greater extent. Quantum Electrodynamics, one of the building blocks of the standard model of particle physics, may be the most precistly tested theory in science. The archetypical example is the anomalous dipole moment which is correctly predicted to 14 decimal places (all the ones we could measure so far). So the theory part of quantum physics is trustworthy. It may not be 100% correct, but it is pretty damned close. But there is a plethora of interpretations of quantum physics, and these are completely uncertain - we can't tell them apart because they are mathematically equivalent and hence all make the same predictions. Each one corresponds to a different real world, but we can't tell which one it is.

Electrons bound to atoms are relatively simple quantum systems, and I don't think our ability to measure them is the limiting factor. It sounds like you are arguing for a Hidden Variables description of the electron, where a point-like electron moves around the nucleus in an well-defined particle orbit like a planet, and it only looks like it's this complex non-local wavefunction (electron cloud) because it moves to quicky for us to resolve its actual orbit. The good news is that it it is possible to interpret standard quantum physics that way