Scientists Teleport Two Objects! Well, sort of....

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Scientists have successfully teleported macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

Here is the article:

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Beaming people in "Star Trek" fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.
But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.
Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.

Although teleportation is associated with the science-fiction series "Star Trek," no one is likely to be beamed anywhere soon.

But the achievement of Polzik's team, in collaboration with the theorist Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, marks an advancement in the field of quantum information and computers, which could transmit and process information in a way that was impossible before.

"It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik whose research is reported in the journal Nature.

Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states, which include physical properties such as energy, motion and magnetic field, of the atoms.

"Creating entanglement is a very important step, but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps -- that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback," he added.

And here is the link:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science...eut/index.html

It should be noted, however, that this is NOT teleportation in the stereotypical sense like the transporter or any of the sci-fi stories we read and watched, but merely as a means for teleportating the quantum properties of an object, bringing the prospects of creating a quantum computer a step closer to reality. However, this technology will never work for humans and here is a direct quote from my friend, the physicist:

"To begin with, in order to bring all the particles of a human being to a state of entanglement, it means reducing it to a bose Einstein condensate, which is a phase of matter formed by bosons cooled to temperatures very near absolute zero. Next, the spin of all the particles in your body must first be made to a specific value per each atoms. We can do this already on a small scale using MRI which can alters the spins of protons in hydrogen molecules. This requires exposing the body to magnetic fields of several telsa, this is only for hydrogen. To do this to other atoms of the body would require magnetic fields and that would be fatal. This would also distrup cellular function, alter body chemistry,etc,etc.. A field of 4 telsa can cause your heart to stop. Now the effects of such very powerful magnetic fields on the body has not been studied, but the kind of fields we are talking about would inflict death in a whole set of interesting manner. Hence, the process would kill you.

Einstein originally thought up an experiment in an attempt to disprove quantum teleportation and supported a theory known as the hidden variable. He believed that all of the quantum strangeness was due to the fact that qualities such as spin and particle position were encoded, but not detected till a particle attributes were measure, unlike the Born's belief that such qualities did not exist till they were measured. His thought experiment (which was not conducted at the time) would have shown that by measuring the spin of one particle, one would automatically know the spin of the other, but what he did not predict was that one could alter the spin of the unmeasured particle by altering the spin of the measured particle, this is the heart of quantum entanglement and teleportation.

Quantum teleportation does not physically move a particle (like quantum tunneling which also depend on the uncertainty principle), it alters the unmeasured properties to that of its measure partner. Basically to entangle particles, you first must bring them to a state of uncoherence, this is similar to Bose-Einstein condensate where all particles involved behave in the manner of quantum particles. This is a very delicate state and as it stands, there's no exact explaination of why particles stop acting in this manner (which is known as collasping the quantum wave function), we know that measuring a particle (or collection of particles) attributes does this, but the "why" is still a mystery.

Data can be transferred because we can send a key telling the observer of the unmeasured particles how we are changing their twin. Can we teleport people in this manner? No, because first, we must alter the spin of every particle of your body to a state where we can entangle them with other particles. Hate to tell you that physically altering you in this manner will kill you. No ifs and or buts! Plus, the data will be lost during quantum teleportation due to the nature of the process, this loss of data is covered by the Bell theorem, which disproved Einstein's original Hidden Variable Theory by showing that the changes done by altering the spin of one particle of the entangle pair would fit a ratio of measurements, that is, it would show that the second particle spin was actually being altered by the measurement process.

The uncertainty principle comes in effect due to the fact that it limits how accurately we can measure any pair of quantity regardless of its spin, energy, momentum, or position of a particle. People are not data and even if they were, the loss of any data in the process would mean that the transfer of the person would not be the original or exact copy and the loss of a single qubit would be fatal. With data transmission there's usually an error checking scheme which is sent and lost data is recovered or resent. Based on this alone, I cannot picture this being done for a person or physical objects. All data transmissions have noise which means original data is always corrupted on some level, the type of data sent is what determines the level of error correction is needed (if any).

The fact that the spin states that the data must be sent via another channel shows that this is not true transfer of particles from one location to another, in fact, the only reason physicists even call this whole process of quantum entanglement teleportation is that the current interperation of quantum reality (which was set in the 1940's) does away with the notion of particles being real entities, only their measured qualities are. So if the first particle is identified by its spin, momentum, etc., altering it entangles its partner characteristics to that of the measure particle, which makes it appear that the original has been teleported.

To reiterate, there will always be information loss. At best, several qubit of data, at wors,t 25 % and we cannot control what data is lost. Even for quantum computing there are problems. Physicists will tell you that the entanglement of particles only exist as long as the particles do not undergo acceleration, which means quantum computers onboard a space craft can only operate when their drive are off. The teleporter of Star Trek does not operate via the method of quantum entanglement anyway. It's just a bunch of Star Trek hype. The only quantum entanglement teleporter we've seen in Sci Fi was on the show Andromeda in the episode entitled, "The Banks of the Lethe", and it was very limited in its use because it required the ship to be adjacent to a black hole. After Harper successfully teleports a fruit from one end of the ship to the other, Dylan decides to use it on himself, in an attempt to teleport to his wife Sara's ship, Starry Wisdom, which was located 300 years in the past. The moment Dylan teleported, he ceased to exist and his clone teleported on the other end, which was composed of matter that was entangled and then given the spin state of the original Dylan.

Recall when I previously stated that to teleport a human being using the quantum entanglement teleporter, that person would have to be reduced to a Bose-Einstein condensate, essentially being frozen at near absolute zero. In Dylan's case, nanobots were use instead of the freezing method, but imagine all the particles of your bodies having their spin states alter by a host of micro machines. The effect is the same, you are reduce into a bose Einstein condensate in order for entanglement to occur. Hence, the Dylan that teleported from Andromeda to the Starry Wisdom is a clone, and that clone that teleported back from the Starry Wisdom to the Andromeda also ceased to exist and became clone number two. Actually they never expressed that view, the writers did the same thing like the writers of the Star Trek series in that they seemingly ignored the fact that the teleported Dylan is just a clone of the original.

Teleportation may be possible but not via quantum entranglement which we refer to as quantum teleportation, and any form of teleportation must preserve the state of the collections of atoms that form our brains which store our conscienceness. The most likely means would have to be via spacial temporal engineering where we shape space in order to eliminate or reduce the distant between points, that is, wormholes are more promising, as least for teleporting a live human."

Fascinating huh?

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