Quantum Teleportation Between Canary Islands Breaks Chinese Record

quantum-entanglement-telescope

ESA’s Optical Ground Station (OGS) on Canary Islands.

A research team seems to have broken the most recent record of distance for quantum teleportation, posted by a Chinese research group. This new record is about the distance between New York City and Philadelphia and concerns the quantum state of a single photon. While it also might sound like the transfer happens instantaneously, the steps required to read out the teleported quantum state ensure that it doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light, which would break causality.

Quantum teleportation uses the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which links quantum particles. Although this link is fragile and invisible, two entangled photons have correlated opposite polarization states. Quantum mechanics states that each photon’s polarization remains undecided until one of them is measured. At that time, the polarization snaps into place, even if many kilometers separate the entangled pair.

quantum-entanglement-canary-islands

It allows a detour to the physics theorem of no-cloning. That theorem states that a quantum object cannot be perfectly copied. This teleportation doesn’t create a copy, it simply shifts the quantum information from one place to another, destroying the original in the process.

This can mean that information can be sent in this fashion and this information could be the gateway to more secure forms of communications between stations. A new European and Canadian research group claims to have transported quantum information from one of the Canary Islands to another, which are 143 kilometers (89 miles) apart. The paper is currently on arXiv.org, but comes from a reputable research group. It will no doubt be published after it’s been peer-reviewed.

Reference: “Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometers using active feed-forward” by Xiao-Song Ma, Thomas Herbst, Thomas Scheidl, Daqing Wang, Sebastian Kropatschek, William Naylor, Bernhard Wittmann, Alexandra Mech, Johannes Kofler, Elena Anisimova, Vadim Makarov, Thomas Jennewein, Rupert Ursin and Anton Zeilinger, 5 September 2012, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/nature11472

8 Comments on "Quantum Teleportation Between Canary Islands Breaks Chinese Record"

  1. So distance is involved? It doesn’t mean that what happens in one part of the universe will also happen instantly in another region?

    • What happens instantly (or at least much faster than the speed of light) is the collapse of the waveform where two entangled particles have agreed to have a correlating property (like polarization in a particular direction). This is what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ and he didn’t like it. Einstein thought what was more likely was the ‘entangled’ particles simply had the same properties upon creation. It turned out he was wrong after experimental testing (see Alain Aspect). Ironically, he predicted entanglement and used it as an argument that quantum mechanics must be wrong because it just seemed too weird. In any case, the spooky action at a distance doesn’t break causality because even though the entangled particles have agreed to have some correlating property, the value/measurement of that property is still random, so entanglement can’t be used to, say, transfer any useful information faster than light from one place to another. (Sorry for the long winded response.)

    • Yes distance can be so much greater it looks so.

    • Most astronomers say that it same rules in whole universe so it should work so even at wast distance.

  2. This is amazing.
    One day…!

  3. For material teleportation in greater scale and distances specific structures make it possible it seems so far in private experiments.
    3D world not obligated to travel in full time so skip the distance in 2D and go back to 3D and so on. 3D for living in the other for transportation.
    Anyway not only theory hate this dry thing more nice to see it work in reality even not believed it at first of course.
    Side effects ozon smell and electronics shut of hundreds of meters away and car alarms on TV foggy radirecievers afffected too. After some time a extremely bright light appear mostly not vissible with naked eye mayby some other frequency must investigate it more and heigh frequent sound of this experiments.

    The room shift for a moment in one plane. Bulb in other word. As gravity get affected in this area.

    Scary a bit but something on the track seems like.
    Not possible traveling in universe with just speed. Can collide with some stone and in huge speed it should destroy ship totaly. Warp- drive just a dream seems like.
    But if such thing exist as what I described in the beginning it nu use of any transport time it just there or almost in seconds, minutes or hours or so no matter how long way.

    Somehow gravity bend over some objects if correct designed.
    Not going in to details but very very very strange things happens make things to be not bound to materia even if they made of it going threw walls everything just appear there.
    Schience no magic.

    Quant motor with it`s many components for being placed in some flying machine carrying Aadvanced robbots discovering far planets etc. Not have t waiting eons for it to arrive and the speed of light to give back the information.
    Hopefully experiments can lead to something like this.
    The experiments also funny. Get just more in to it as interest rise. Canary project inspire as it not so impossible anyway. Physics a must behind everything as I not like pseudo things.
    With knowledge we will travel to the stars not by magic.
    It easy to make some connection to magic in such area and it is not good.

    As magic not exist in nature.
    Phenomenon work or not so it is in reality.

    So many decades of thinking of this things and for some years ago people began to experiment with similar.
    It give much hope.
    Regards

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