Teleportation Actually Exists

1/27/2019 | 5 min read

To most, teleportation sounds like a far-off concept. In television shows and movies, it involves moving a person or thing from one place to another in the blink of an eye. Though such scenarios are indeed far-off, if not actually impossible, teleportation does exist, and recent advancements in the quantum field have proved it. In fact, the University of Science and Technology in Shanghai was able to successfully achieve quantum teleportation over the distance of 870 miles. To fully understand this and its implications for the future, one needs to first recalibrate their idea of teleportation and understand what is actually being relocated.

At the heart of the experiment is a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. When this occurs, two quantum objects — in this case, photons — created in the same space and at the same time are connected in such a way that if something happens to one, the other will instantly be affected as well. Einstein referred to this as “spooky action at a distance.”

In fact, at the quantum level, the simple act of observation will alter the state of these objects. As explained in a Popular Mechanics article, “Think of it like ordering takeout at a fast food joint. If you order both a burger and a grilled chicken sandwich, you don’t know which is before opening the boxes. But as soon as you open one, you immediately know what’s in the other without looking. This is true regardless of how far away the second box is.” For scientists, the biggest hurdle has been preserving and proving the entanglement over large distances.

This is what happened last year in Shanghai. The researchers repeatedly fired a laser beam carrying a photon from a ground station in Tibet to the Micius satellite in orbit. This photon was entangled with another photon on the ground, and the scientists then had a third particle interact with the photon on the ground. Once this interaction took place between the two photons on the ground, the entangled photon in space changed, effectively becoming a mirror of the one on the ground. So, as reported by BBC, “The twin contains information about the third particle and effectively takes on its existence.” The researchers created 4,000 photon pairs per second and shot each half of the pair through the beam, measured more than 1000 successful pairs, and found that the “spooky action” had been confirmed over a record distance.

This success opens up great opportunity in the realm of communication and security, as “information” is what is actually being teleported. All of the data is replicated and teleported faster than the speed of light, which means quantum teleportation could hold the key to advanced informational security. There is no messenger for that information since there is no time between when that data was sent and when it arrived. Because the action occurs simultaneously between the quantum entities, there is no chance that it can be hacked.

“In the future it is quite possible that certain types of information will be transferred via quantum networks. … Teleportation will enable the transfer of quantum information in the form of quantum states from one place to another, thereby forming a quantum network. … Messages cannot be intercepted and read by eavesdroppers,” says Jerome Luine, principal scientist and quantum sensing and metrology research lead at Northrop Grumman Next Basic Research. In fact, even if those messages were intercepted, their states would be instantly disrupted in such a way that both parties would know immediately about the interference.

Further advancements and tests in this technology could lead to significant breakthroughs in quantum computing and the quantum internet, both of which hold promise not only for data security, but also for advanced computing on an unimaginable scale. Sometimes great accomplishments are achieved in tiny, incremental steps. This one, however, was done over 870 miles into space.

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