7 ms·
Researchers have successfully teleported wave packets of light
- guelo 16y agoI have no idea what that experiment does but the pic is cool! EDIT: The pic is not cool?
- sorbus 16y agoDownvotes probably due to people thinking that your comment adds nothing to the conversation, not necessarily disagreeing with you (I would think that the pic would be cooler if it were higher res; as it is, I can't make much sense of it).
- nicklovescode 16y agohttp://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201104/r751650_6238699.jpg http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201104/r751650_6238699.jpg reasonably high res
- metageek 16y ago(a) So, what, those are optics they use to bounce the beam around, so they can get 10km of laser beam on a 5m bench? (b) I can't look at that picture without thinking of Agatha's dingbots from Girl Genius. http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091005 http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091005
- cbarnardo 16y agoI think its cool.
- CoffeeDregs 16y agoSo what's the meaning here? I've been reading similar (to a non quantum physicist) stories for years and RTFA. What will this change about my life?
- jerf 16y agoIt sounds to me like it's an incremental improvement on existing technique, which the researchers are justifiably excited about, and through the Mighty Power of Mass-Market Science Journalism (TM) it becomes something that has never been done before, instead of it "merely" being done better than ever before. Photons have definitely been "teleported" before, as have individual atoms [1]. Though I scare-quote the word because it doesn't really precisely correspond to what people think of when they hear the term. It's interesting, but it's not a breakthrough, nor does it herald any sort of advance in anything resembling Star Trek transporters, though to its credit I think this is the first Mass Market Science Journalism (TM) article on quantum teleportation I've seen that managed to avoid that faulty comparison, so points for that I guess. [1]: http://www.livescience.com/7647-teleportation-milestone-achieved.html http://www.livescience.com/7647-teleportation-milestone-achi... (which I would note fails the Star Trek test)
- fragsworth 16y agoMinimum round trip time between San Francisco and Tokyo is about 60ms due to the speed of light, which means in practice FPS games are unplayable across the ocean. If they manage to implement this shit, we'll be able to have FPS games hosted anywhere in the world!
- jerf 16y agoThis technology can not be used for faster-than-light communication. If it could, this would orders of magnitude larger news than it is.
- iwjames 16y agoHeh, I wish. Unfortunately, the word teleport here does not mean what everybody immediately thinks. Otherwise, this would mean sooo much more than lower latency gaming.
- burgerbrain 16y agoIf we could actually break causality, playing games would be the last thing on our minds.
- CamperBob 16y agoI, uh, recognize the Hammond 1590D box. Do I get partial credit?
- gregschlom 16y agoOne thing that isn't clear in this article is whether they really teleportated it, meaning that they were able to transfer information instantaneously from point A to point B (which would go against Einstein's relativity law that states that nothing can go faster than the speed of light), or if they just transported a light beam from one point to another with regular means of communication. It sounds more like it's the later case, and the word "teleportation" here is probably more a link bait than anything else. And in any case, the title in the article is horrible: "Scientists teleport Schrodinger's cat"
- burgerbrain 16y agoQuantum teleportation does not allow for faster than light transmission of information. "It does not transport the system itself, nor does it allow communication of information at superluminal (faster than light) speed." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quantum_teleportation https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quantum_telep... I doubt this is different.
- cpeterso 16y agoSubspace radio allows for faster than light communication.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoMagic, too.
- Saavedro 16y agoThis is not FTL no, that's still impossible and if they'd done -that- this would be a big deal indeed. What this allows is simply transmitting "quantum information" from one place to another with any reliability at all, by packing it with classical information that helps accomplish that (being the macro-object/light packet). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem explains why transmission of quantum information is difficult. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem explains why quantum effects do not enable FTL transfer of classical information.
- fragsworth 16y agoDoes this conflict with the notion of the speed of light being a universal maximum speed? If teleporting information causes bi-directional communication to be instant, aren't signals being propagated at faster than the speed of light?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sorbus 16y agoIt's not instantaneous; there's no conflict, no FTL to see here.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- raheemm 16y agoAnd this is why science is hard to report on
- tyng 16y agoCan someone please explain what the term "teleport" mean here? I'm not getting why this is an amazing scientific breakthrough (but I'd love to learn why it is). If it doesn't mean information travelling instantaneously or faster than light, then did the reporter (or the scientist) put the word "teleport" in the title just so it's attention grabbing?!
- hammock 16y agoCan anyone explain what quantum teleportation is? Wikipedia does not help, aside from assuring me that it is not what I thought it was: Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a process by which a qubit (the basic unit of quantum information) can be transmitted exactly (in principle) from one location to another, without the qubit being transmitted through the intervening space. It is useful for quantum communication and computation. It does not transport the system itself, nor does it allow communication of information at superluminal (faster than light) speed. Neither does it concern rearranging the particles of a macroscopic object to copy the form of another object.
- ohyes 16y agoThey entangled a q-bit with a packet of light, and then sent it from one place to another (presumably using fiber optic or something), without breaking entanglement. This is important because it gets you the ability to route quantum information to different places. Presumably a quantum bus in a computer or a quantum fiber-optic line. I can see the marketing pamphlets now!
- teej 16y agoI found it best described as such: you put a white marble and a black marble in separate paper bags. You send one to a friend. As soon as you open the bag, you instantaneously know what color the other marble is. That doesn't mean you can instantaneously communicate with your friend.
- Saavedro 16y agoA better word for non-quantum-physicists would be "transport" here. It's very difficult to move quantum bits from one place to another at all. The light beam is used to increase the reliability of that process. This doesn't affect how -classical- information is transmitted or make it any better. It makes -quantum- information transmission reliable, which is actually pretty significant. This should allow for quantum computers of larger sizes than the super-tiny ones that have been created so far to actually work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem (why it is difficult to transmit quantum information) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation (what is being done in this experiment) What the breakthrough is is a way to do quantum telportation reliably -and- quickly (which had both been done before)
- bmunro 16y agoWhy are people assuming that 'teleportation' means instantaneous travel? To me, teleporting has always meant transferring the information that describes an object to another location, where the object is reproduced. This transfer of information occurs via light/radio waves or similar.
- jerf 16y agoI hate to post what is nearly a "me too", but I'd also like to ask that question, with the clarification that I do not mean it as a rhetorical equivalent of "No, of course it's not instantaneous, duh", I am genuinely curious where the sheer confidence of the definition of "teleportation" as "instantaneous in violation of relativity" suddenly came from. Is there some scifi show on TV that I'm not watching that is promulgating this interpretation or something? I've seen the belief that entanglement can be used for FTL communication going back unto yea the very beginnings of the internet but this solid and shared definition of instantaneous is new to me vs. even the iteration of this whole argument I saw a few months ago. (Fringe maybe? Haven't started that yet.)
- terandle 16y agoNot sure how anyone could of missed the whole teleport = instantaneous thing... Thankfully Wikipedia is here to save the day! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fiction_containing_teleportation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fiction_containing_tele...
- victorantos 16y agochinese dit it even over the air last year, distance - 16 km http://www.physorg.com/news193551675.html http://www.physorg.com/news193551675.html so what's new?
- tehwalrus 16y agoAnyone found the DOI link yet? The explanation in the article is, I agree, awful, and I want to read what they actually did! If it was only moving a bit of information from RAM to a register (or the quantum equivalent) which it sounds like...then yea, no biggie.
- Blunt 16y agoTeleportation is a misnomer here. Nothing is being teleported or transmitted rather information is being measured in two different locations simultaneously as if it were teleported. What I believe is that information is showing up in two different locations simultaneously. This term, entanglement, I think means that every quantum spin has an equal and opposite quantum spin at some other location that always exists. In other words, there's an opposite "thing" of our "thing" and when we adjust our "thing" we can now see or measure the opposite "thing" adjusting oppositely.
- bradharper 16y agoThe damn cat was not both alive and dead simultaneously...
- hanibash 16y agoI'll try to explain from what I understood in quantum physics class years ago. When you're dealing with things on the quantum level, observing a particle affects it. Remember Schrodinger's cat? The cat is both dead and alive, until someone opens the box. The opening of the box gives the cat its new state of deadness or aliveness. Quantum teleportation works through entangled particles. Entangled particles are, in some sense, the same particle in two places. An action on one entangled particle will instantly affect the other particle, including observation of the particle. Suppose Alice and Bob share an entangled particle. Alice observes the particle on her end, collapsing it into one of four states. Which state it collapses into is and always will be completely random. Bob's particle was instantaneously affected in one of four ways corresponding to those states. Trouble is, he doesn't know which way, and he can't do anything with his particle until he does. Alice has to communicate to Bob in any regular way, through light, telephone or internet, what she observed on her end, so that Bob knows what exactly happened to his particle, and what to do with it. So in this way, it really was instantaneous over a distance, but at the same time nothing useful happened faster than the speed of light.