Scotty, pleaaaase beam me up…
By Jesica Levingston Mac leod, PhD
Jokes aside… well, I can’t stop myself for writing “Scotty, beam me up”, teleportation has already been done with atoms, photons and ions, for example in Universities in China, Germany and Maryland. Are you surprise by all this examples? The process of quantum teleportation of multiple degrees of freedom of a single photon has been done at the University of Science and Technology of China last year. They performed a free-space, ground level link measuring approx. 100 km across the Qinghai Lake in China with high fidelity. The official name of the protocol is “long distance quantum teleportation with polarization qubits” (a quantum bit is the analogue of a “bit” of information). A second group from China has plans to create a quantum space communications system by sending to space a satellite that could facilitate quantum teleportation of photons between earth and space.
Other successful story in teleportation was performed using optical modes. Lee and collaborators generated an EPR state by using two degenerate optical parametric oscillators and a balanced beam splitter. The EPR paradox is a fundamental concept introduced by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (their last names initial gave the name to this theory) back in 1935. They claimed that the wave function, as the representation of a particular pure quantum state, does not provide a complete description of the physical reality. Also, quantum teleportation with matter has been performed by other group using atomic ensembles of caesium atoms at room temperature, showing light-to-matter teleportation of a coherent state of an optical mode into a collective atomic spin. More than 13 years ago, Gao and collaborators, performed the amazing quantum teleportation from a propagating photon to a solid-state spin qubit, by exiting a neutral quantum dot onto the electron spin of a charged second quantum dot. So they were the first ones who teleported a photonic frequency qubit. These advances in quantum teleportation are the Holy Grail for the “real” teleportation that we are all crossing fingers to be bring to our everyday world soon…hopefully very soon.
Moreover, these advances in teleportation technology opened the talk to pass to the next frontier: the teleportation of a live organism. The good news on this topic were published in Science at the beginning of this year. Two physicist from China, Tongcang Li and Zhang-qi Yin, propose to put a microorganism with a mass much smaller than the mass of the electromechanical membrane ( for example a bacterium) on top of an electromechanical membrane oscillator integrated with a superconducting circuit to prepare the quantum superposition state of a microorganism and teleport its quantum state. This tiny microorganism will not significantly affect the quality factor of the membrane and can be cooled to the quantum ground state together with the membrane. With a strong magnetic field gradient, the internal states of a microorganism, such as the electron spin of a glycine radical, can be entangled with its center-of-mass motion and be teleported to a remote microorganism. Since internal states of an organism contain information, this proposal provides a scheme for teleporting information between two remote organisms. Basically, what they described was a method to put a microorganism in two places at the same time, and provide a scheme to teleport the quantum state of a microbe (read more about it here). Unfortunately, all this is a just a great theory so far…
Sadly, as an Aprils fool joke, a really good one, the US army reported that they had teleported 9 soldiers from Massachusetts to Germany (here is the funny full article). They remained me that the term “teleportation” has coined by and American author Charles Port in 1931, he was a researcher of anomaly phenomena, phenomena that fall outside of existing understanding.
Recently, German researches from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Jena reported the Implementation of quantum and classical discrete fractional Fourier transforms, which represented a huge advance toward teleportation. Back in 2014, they had already generated of a new class of optical beams that are radially self-accelerating and non-diffracting. These beams continuously evolve on spiraling trajectories while maintaining their amplitude and phase distribution in their rotating rest frame. Also check out the fun article in Nature title “photonics: random sudoku light”, were the same authors described how they have imprinted on the laser beam a phase pattern that corresponds to numerical solutions to overlapping sodukus. Translated to “normal” humans it means that they teleported elementary particles (light particles and electrons) in a “spatially delocalized state,” which allows them to be in two separate places at the same time. Oh Germans, such a bunch of funny people… at least in science related fields.
Mr. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal, wants to build a high-speed tube service Hyperloop which is capable of travelling around 700 mph. He is targeting to make the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco as short as 30 min using this “as close as you can get to teleportation” system. Let me leave you with a geeky quote from the book Endure by Carrie Jones: “We teleported,” Issie finishes. “Like in Star Trek or Harry Potter, sort of. No! Like in Dr. Who in that episode with the Sontarans and the brilliant human boy, or really any Dr. Who ever if you think of the Tardis! Holy canola! That is just the coolest thing ever! Wowie, wow, wow!”
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