Teleportation edges closer

“Beam me up Scotty” no longer based in fiction?

Teleportation may well be realised in the not too distant future based on the work by Chinese scientists.

Photons were beamed from a ground station in Ngari in Tibet to Micius, a satellite currently in orbit 300 miles above Earth.

Ok…..so it does not mean that you will be able to teleport from New York to London in 40 seconds….just yet.

The teleportation we are talking about here is on the quantum level, and a significant step towards a brighter, safer, un-hackable internet of the future.

In a nutshell quantum teleportation is the act in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another – kind of teleporting it to a distant location.

“Space-scale teleportation can be realised and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum internet,”

the authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China, wrote in the paper.

This revolutionary new feat in the world of quantum teleportation sets  new record in the field. It is fair to say this tech is far from faultless as we are just at the start really with much getting in the way of reliability of the process. The paper describes how the team, situated in a mountain top lab for more than 32 days, sent millions of photons to the satellite and achieved teleportation in 911 cases.

Not the sort of risk I’d be willing to take in “beaming me up” …just yet.  To be clear, it is really the quantum state (the information) of the photons which is being transferred to the others, and there is much interference along the way – entanglement and all. In quantum teleportation, a third particle is introduced and entangled with one of the original pair, in such a way that its distant partner assumes the exact state of the third particle.

This whole transferring light across the miles (especially from earth to space) has quite a significant amount of data flying off in all different directions, well off target, however, it has smashed the record for or the longest distance for which entanglement has been measured.

Sure….it has some hiccups at this stage, but defiantly steps are being taken to evolve this into a mechanism we will no doubt take for granted in the not too distant future.

“This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet,”

…the team say.

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