Teleportation and The Tenth Dimension

Quantum Communication isn’t just sci-fi anymore

Teleportation experiments represent a crucial step toward future quantum networks in space, which require space to ground quantum communication.

A few months ago, the Chinese physicists achieved a great progress by teleporting more than 1100 photons over a distance of 97 kilometres in only four hours, but the teleportation competition still continues.

Their achievement was soon followed by another one, when a team of European scientists at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, in Vienna, Austria, led by physicist, Prof. Dr. Anton Zeilinger transferred the information stored on a stream of photons from two locations separated by 143 kilometers (about 93 miles) apart.

Two teams of researchers have extended the reach of quantum teleportation to unprecedented lengths, roughly equivalent to the distance between New York City and Philadelphia. But don’t expect teleportation stations to replace airports or train terminals—the teleportation scheme shifts only the quantum state of a single photon.

And although part of the transfer happens instantaneously, the steps required to read out the teleported quantum state ensure that no information can be communicated faster than the speed of light, reports Scientific American

Quantum teleportation relies on the phenomenon of entanglement, through which quantum particles share a fragile, invisible link across space. Two entangled photons, for instance, can have correlated, opposite polarization states—if one photon is vertically polarized, for instance, the other must be horizontally polarized.

"Experiment was conducted between Alice's transmitter station at the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) of the Isaac Newton Group on La Palma and Bob's receiver station at the Optical Ground Station (OGS) of the European Space Agency on Tenerife, separated by 143 km, both at altitudes of about 2400 m."

But, thanks to the intricacies of quantum mechanics, each photon’s specific polarization remains undecided until one of them is measured. At that instant the other photon’s polarization snaps into its opposing orientation, even if many kilometers have come between the entangled pair. An entangled photon pair serves as the intermediary in the standard teleportation scheme. Say Alice wants to teleport the quantum state of a photon to Bob. First she takes one member of a pair of entangled photons, and Bob takes the other.

Then Alice lets her entangled photon interfere with the photon to be teleported and performs a polarization measurement whose outcome depends on the quantum state of both of her particles.

Because of the link between Alice and Bob forged by entanglement, Bob’s photon instantly feels the effect of the measurement made by Alice. Bob’s photon assumes the quantum state of Alice’s original photon, but in a sort of garbled form. Bob cannot recover the quantum state Alice wanted to teleport until he reverses that garbling by tweaking his photon in a way that depends on the outcome of Alice’s measurement.

English: A graph showing how teleportation can actually occur . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So he must await word from Alice about how to complete the teleportation—and that word cannot travel faster than the speed of light. That restriction ensures that teleported information obeys the cosmic speed limit.

Even though teleportation does not allow superluminal communication, it does provide a detour around another physics blockade known as the no-cloning theorem. That theorem states that one cannot perfectly copy a quantum object to, for instance, send a facsimile to another person.

But teleportation does not create a copy per se—it simply shifts the quantum information from one place to another, destroying the original in the process.

Teleportation can also securely transmit quantum information even when Alice does not know where Bob is.

Bob can take his entangled particle wherever he pleases, and Alice can broadcast her instructions for how to ungarble the teleported state over whatever conventional channels—radio waves, the Internet—she pleases.

That information would be useless to an eavesdropper without an entangled link to Alice. All recent experiments represent a crucial step toward future guantum networks in space, which require space to ground quantum communication.

Teleportation, if one day successfully achieved, will be the basis of more-or-less perfectly secure communication that can never be hacked, even in principle. Source: Message To Eagle

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

 Everyone understands the concept of 3D (or three dimensional). It’s easy to explain because that is the world we live in. Also, 2D (or two dimensional) is simple enough because we have flat things that we can extrapolate using our imagination into a two-dimensional world. But unfortunately for the human brain, there are far more than three dimensions — there are 10, and six of those have to do with space/time.

Don’t confuse yourself trying to understand everything; just watch this video. It’s the best explanation for the 10 dimensions of space that I’ve ever seen! It will expand your horizons, and it’ll require some concentration OK? . Source: Discovery News

Related articles

• How to build a teleportation machine: Intro to qubits (quantumfrontiers.com)

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