Jan 25 2009
Beam It Over, Scotty
To the delight of Star Trek fans, physicists have recently advanced the high-science of teleportation. They teleported not physical matter but information over a full 1-meter’s worth of a whopping chasm of space. Which may not seem whopping to you or me or any other incredibly massive creature. Well, incredibly massive when using “measuring sticks” more appropriate for the atomic realm.
The bad news is that less than an atom’s worth of information was teleported. Not even the dot of an “i” in a telephone book or a fragment of a human eyelash. Don’t expect Jet Blue Airlines to start offering teleportation to the Bahamas anytime soon. They’d probably lose your luggage anyway.
Here’s what the researchers succeeded in doing -
Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance.
More specifically -
When an entangled condition is identified, the scientists immediately take a measurement of ion A. The act of measurement forces it out of superposition and into a definite condition: one of the two qubit states. But because ion A’s state is irreversibly tied to ion B’s, the measurement of A also forces B into a complementary state. Depending on which state ion A is found in, the researchers now know precisely what kind of microwave pulse to apply to ion B in order to recover the exact information that had originally been stored in ion A. Doing so results in the accurate teleportation of the information.
But there is some potentially bad news for aspiring teleportees -
Teleportation works because of a remarkable quantum phenomenon, called “entanglement,” which only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale.
I’m no physicist, but that scale problem could be a dream-breaker. Then again, who knows what advances await? I still get a kick out of sending documents and photos over the Internet. Not true teleportation . . . but WOW nonetheless. At least if we remember a time of making copies and sliding them into an envelope and licking a stamp and walking to the mailbox . . . .
