Quantum Teleportation

Like the note on "Mind Reading" in early Jan, here's another geeky newsworthy event so that someday Vivian may marvel how primitive we were. This is about quantum physics which I won't pretend to understand. It was reported in Science on Jan 23rd.

It all starts with Schrödinger's cat. You can't tell whether the cat in the box is alive or dead until you open the box to look at it. Till a quantum orientation of a particle is read, it is in a quantum superimposition of all the states it can be in. In 1993 a scientist at IBM postulated that this enables us to willingly entangle multiple quantum particles and then move them apart at which point they continue to have this spooky action at a distance thing - and if the experiment is cast in terms of reading and writing information, then the information from one seems to get written to another, and voila - you have teleportation.

It's taken 16 years to produce a working experiment in which information was magically moved between two atoms almost one meter apart. Two atoms were placed in two boxes about a meter apart in a lab in Maryland and some quantum information was written on to one atom. Then they were put in quantum entanglement by using an interesting process: a laser pulse was used to simultaneously excite each atom to produce a photon. Every once in a while (OK - once in every 100 million tries) a system of optics and a semitransparent beam splitter trapped one "red" and one "blue" photon being simultaneously emitted by the atoms. The optics prevented you from knowing what atom emitted which photon and the two atoms were thus now entangled. The graphics below are from the NYT.


Next the scientists went back to the atom on which the information had been written and read it's quantum state. This destroyed the information. But due to entanglement, the information could now be measured on the second atom.

Vivian - they may still be making crappy Star Trek movies long after it actually becomes possible to beam Kirk up.