How realistic is teleportation? – Businesses

Science fiction or near future? Trends wonders all summer long. This week we explore how realistic teleportation is. Some form of teleportation already exists, but moving people at the speed of light will forever remain a utopia. What appears to be an established mobility gadget in science fiction is still woven into the microworld of quantum theory.

Harry Potter and Star Trek fans will always dream of it. Potter and his friends can move through the magic of “phenomena”, while in the universe of Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock uses a machine to deconstruct a crew member’s DNA to reassemble it elsewhere as if distance didn’t exist.
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Harry Potter and Star Trek fans will always dream of it. Potter and his friends can move through the magic of “phenomena”, while in the universe of Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock uses a machine to deconstruct a crew member’s DNA to reassemble it elsewhere as if distance didn’t exist. As unlikely as teleportation may seem, a number of experiments have been conducted in the last quarter of a century that seem to indicate that the phenomenon is getting closer. In 1998, Professor Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna succeeded in moving a photon from one bank of the Danube to the other. Twenty years later, a research group from the QuTech lab at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) conducted an experiment that reconfirmed that it is possible to teleport quantum information. She could entangle two electrons that were separated from each other so that they shared each other’s properties. Have the first steps towards teleportation been taken? Teleportation, as it appears in science fiction, starts from the idea that it is possible to collect all the information from an object down to the subatomic level, move that information faster than light and reconstruct the object elsewhere. “But in quantum theory it is a fundamental law that you cannot move particles faster than light,” says Frank Verstraete, professor of physics at Ghent University. The word has fallen: quantum theory. You need it to describe the world on a subatomic level. In order to make teleportation possible, an object – or a person – must be decoded to that level. Only in that discipline of physics many laws appear that seem so counterintuitive that quantum theory almost becomes a philosophical discipline. Actually, quantum physics is a kind of probability interpretation of reality, in which every tiny particle is in a quantum state. That is a wave curve that is a combination of variables such as the position, direction and speed at which the particle is moving. For teleportation, you would have to collect all the information about the quantum state of an object before sending it. However, according to another physical principle, it is impossible to fully determine the quantum state of an object. Physicists refer to Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation for this. As early as 1927, he described that in quantum mechanics there are pairs whose magnitudes cannot be accurately recorded simultaneously. In other words: if you accurately determine the position of a particle, the speed becomes uncertain. As an analogy, think of a dice. You have a one in six chance of rolling three. But the more likely you are to roll three, the less likely you are to roll anything else. In quantum mechanics it is possible that two particles simultaneously have several properties that seem to be mutually exclusive. For example, qubits, the quantum versions of the classical zeros and ones of digital information, can be zero and one at the same time. If you transpose that thought from the subatomic level to the sensory world, you arrive at Schrödinger’s cat. In that 1935 thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box containing a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a bottle of hydrocyanic acid. When the atom decays, the Geiger counter strikes and the bottle of hydrocyanic acid breaks. In that case, the cat dies. If it doesn’t expire, the cat will live. In quantum theory, the cat can be dead and alive at the same time, as long as you haven’t opened the box to see if the atom has decayed. For Schrödinger, that experiment was enough to conclude that quantum mechanics was only a theoretical model, but not a description of the real world, in which a cat can never be dead and alive at the same time. Quantum theory does prove its usefulness for understanding small particles in physics. And we now have tools to do experiments on an atomic level and see things that Schrödinger thought was impossible. For example, the experiments in Delft have shown that you can transfer information about the position and direction of an electron via teleportation without changing it. “We did that without moving the electron itself,” says Lieven Vandersypen, the Flemish scientific director of QuTech in Delft, the quantum technology institute of TU Delft and the Dutch organization for applied scientific research TNO. “In our experiments with the teleportation of quantum information, an electron is present in both places. We only move the information about the state of the electron.” That is not easy. This requires an entanglement of the two electrons first. The bottom line is that with two entangled electrons on the one side a change in the information occurs, but also immediately with the electron on the other side. That’s a multi-layered correlation. Suppose you toss a coin and you write the result on two pieces of paper. You send one to someone in New York and the other to someone in Los Angeles. No one can know what is in those envelopes, but if the result is with one coin, it will be the same with the other. Entanglement first came into the limelight in a 1930s paper by Albert Einstein. He saw in it proof that quantum mechanics was incomplete. According to him, there must be ghostly forces at work that could make two particles in different places become inextricably linked, so that they share all their properties. By illuminating two electrons with the same laser beam and entangled by the light they emit, the researchers in Delft showed that entanglement is indeed possible. In 2014 they did this over a distance of 3 metres, four years later over a distance of 1.3 kilometres. QuTech’s test is a step towards teleporting quantum information over great distances. Via an optical cable it then becomes possible to move information at the speed of light. But if superfast internet is the only advantage, does teleportation make sense? “There are certainly useful applications of that insight,” says Vandersypen. “We are working here in Delft on a quantum version of the internet. That is not only about speed, but also about security. Nobody can listen in or make a change without being noticed. Because if someone tries to intercept the photon, it affects the quantum state. and it gets noticed.” Is an alternative to blockchain technology more appropriate than a future application in space travel? Vandersypen: “You could see a parallel with blockchain technology, as they both increase the security of encryption. But the difference is that blockchain starts from the assumption that the most powerful computers cannot crack the key, while a quantum version relies on natural laws to ensure security. The quantum internet is simply uncrackable for hackers.”

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