Slashdot Mirror


First Object Teleported From Earth To Orbit (technologyreview.com)

Researchers in China have teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite orbiting more than 500 kilometers above. From a report: Last year, a Long March 2D rocket took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert carrying a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher who died in 391 B.C. The rocket placed Micius in a Sun-synchronous orbit so that it passes over the same point on Earth at the same time each day. Micius is a highly sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. That's important because it should allow scientists to test the technological building blocks for various quantum feats such as entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation. Today, the Micius team announced the results of its first experiments. The team created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, in the process smashing the record for the longest distance over which entanglement has been measured. And they've used this quantum network to teleport the first object from the ground to orbit. Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function.

2 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stock Traders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No-Communication Theorem

    In physics, the no-communication theorem is a no-go theorem from quantum information theory which states that, during measurement of an entangled quantum state, it is not possible for one observer, by making a measurement of a subsystem of the total state, to communicate information to another observer. The theorem is important because, in quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement is an effect by which certain widely separated events can be correlated in ways that suggest the possibility of instantaneous communication. The no-communication theorem gives conditions under which such transfer of information between two observers is impossible. These results can be applied to understand the so-called paradoxes in quantum mechanics, such as the EPR paradox, or violations of local realism obtained in tests of Bell's theorem. In these experiments, the no-communication theorem shows that failure of local realism does not lead to what could be referred to as "spooky communication at a distance" (in analogy with Einstein's labeling of quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance").

  2. Re:A photon is not an "object" by Aighearach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    About 100 years ago Bertrand Russell pointed out that probability means we can't mathematically differentiate between chance and "free will." If you graph the choices a bunch of humans make, it comes out with the same Gaussian distribution as the photon spread pattern.

    There seem to be many differences between "objects" at the atomic scale, and sub-atomic particles. Rather than being the same as teleportation of an object, this seems to be more the same as teleportation of intent; it has no weight at all. It is a measurable thing, but it is not guaranteed to have substance outside of a narrow context.