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Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

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Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#81
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "fairly certain", it's absolutely certain. http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/12/quantum-teleportation-dem... (Also submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12549728 )

What if you destroy the entanglement by destroying one of the entangled particles? You can't do this by shooting it with a particle accelerator, or else the entanglement infects whatever you hit it with; but you could use an intense field like sending a photon into a black hole or an atom into a neutron star to be ripped apart. Is there a rule for describing the entanglement of the resulting constituent particles wit…

> What if you destroy the entanglement

That is a very good idea, but doesn't work. The only way to "destroy an entanglement" is to bring the entangled particles back together.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

or the movie version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

And if you get through those you might enjoy this one too:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#82
post #78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "fairly certain", it's absolutely certain. http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/12/quantum-teleportation-dem... (Also submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12549728 )

It is not absolutely certain. Quantum theory is an incomplete description of the physical laws of our universe, and the mechanism behind quantum teleportation is not even fully understood within the framework of that theory. So, it is most certainly not absolutely certain that FTL communication by this means is impossible, though it would be fairly surprising. The premise upon which the idea that it is impossible is…

It is as certain as anything in science. Yes, QM is incomplete, but it places hard constraints on the space of possible completions, and none of them allow FTL communications. FTL would break not only QM and relativity, but causality: it would allow you to send information backwards in time.

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#83
Not quite as impressive when you know, and if you don't you should before opening this link, that "quantum teleportation" is not teleportation. It was a cool-sounding name at the time, but has nothing to do with sci-fi style teleportation: nothing disappears from one place and then shows up in another.

"Quantum teleportation" is a process of information duplication using particles that already exist, and have been positioned such that there is enough distance between them that we can rule out direct interaction between them (that we know of given the current state of physics). Quantum teleportation is the process by which we then manipulate only the particles on one side of the distance divide, such that particles on the other side "end up" reflecting the same state that the ones we manipulated were.

Although "ending up" is probably the wrong term, because we use particles in special states of which we already know they're entangled, then split them up (which does not cancel entanglement) and then we make use of their entanglement property: running an algorithm involving particles on one side should yield the exact same result as running the same algorithm on the other side, so a much more interesting algorithm is one that you run on one side in one way, and on the other in a different way, to effect a "data copy" without ever actually copying data (and very much without any kind of teleportation. The fact that you run your process with "the same particle" is the special part. Being able to even have two particles that are literally the same is a pretty bizarre bit of physics)

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#84
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "measurement" or "observation" a simplified term for a complex process? It can't be as simple as a human "looking" at something since there's nothing special about humans (that I know of). I really wish I had the time and capability to understood how quantum entanglement really works. It seems a lot like magic if you take the layman explanations at face value.

More people-oriented answers: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3158 Shortest answer to that question: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3162 >Imagine at home you put one glove in your coat without looking (and noticing it's only one of the two). After exiting the train you notice it's cold and you pull out that single glove. At this very instant you know it's either the left or the right glove, and you the…

In this classical picture the decision which glove was in your pocket was made when you put it into your pocket. Still in your pocket, the glove already interacted with the world like a right or left glove e. g. the glove bulged the pocket in a certain way and moved fluff around in your pocket. If the gloves would be quantum objects, the glove would be in a superposition state. At the same time the content in your pocket would be the right and left glove. Hence it would interact with your pocket in both ways before measured leaving your fluff in your pocket also in an undetermined (superposition) state.

Things get more complicated here because we talk about huge classical objects with a lot of atoms. And here it is practically impossible to obtain such a superposition because the glove interacts a lot with the environment. E. g. by looking at the bulge of your pocket you might be able to determine the glove type without opening the pocket.

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#85
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did nothing of the sort. Quantum physicists use words like teleport to say completely different things then what those words actually mean.

This is correct. I'll quote the article here: "What happened is the instantaneous and disembodied transfer of the photon’s quantum state onto the remaining photon of the entangled pair, which is the one that remained six kilometres away at the university,” says Tittel". So teleport in this case doesn't really mean teleport, it just refers to the "teleportation" or transfer of a quantum state.

I am not a career physicist, but have read much and thought deeply about these things.

> So teleport in this case doesn't really mean teleport

I would disagree with this statement. For all intents and purposes, the photon receiving the "transfer" is now indistinguishable from the photon that was transferred, before the event took place. That is to say, it has a completely identical quantum state following the transfer, and the "original" photon no longer has that "original" quantum state. They are only separate in space, and the transfer event took place at a defined "instant in time". It is is indeed ok to call this teleportation as (although this might seem odd in the practical sense) it is not possible to prove that the original photon was not teleported through space-time.

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#86

I posted this in a duplicate thread: For those thinking that this is a step towards faster-than-light (FTL) communication: As far as I know it's fairly certain that quantum entanglement will not allow for FTL communication. Basic principle is that while measurements between both sides will be correlated, it's not possible to tell how they are correlated until both sides compare measurements. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Is "measurement" or "observation" a simplified term for a complex process? It can't be as simple as a human "looking" at something since there's nothing special about humans (that I know of). I really wish I had the time and capability to understood how quantum entanglement really works. It seems a lot like magic if you take the layman explanations at face value.

Let me give you a couple pointers; I did my Master's thesis in quantum transport.

(A) Measurement and observation is NOT a simplified term for a well-understood complex process. It is an atomic term for a not-well-understood (therefore maybe simple or complex, we don't know) process which is really extremely simple if we take it at its surface meaning and don't poke inside it too far.

Let me take the simplest example, the Stern Gerlach experiment. This is really simple: put two long magnets next to each other with a "gap" between them, and preferably give them very different shapes; this creates an "inhomogeneous magnetic field" between them. It turns out a spinning electric charge, when it comes into such a field, should get deflected based on the direction that it's spinning.

Fire a beam of electrons at this apparatus, and you'll notice something interesting. Let me give some coordinates: if the gap between the two magnets is "horizontal" and the electrons go through it "forwards", they split into two beams, half going "up" and half going "down". We say that these have 'spin up" and "spin down" but that depends on a bunch of little arbitrary choices. If you put another apparatus "horizontal" in front of either beam, you'll notice that those ones going "up" all go "up" through the second set of magnets; likewise for the ones going "down".

So there's a lot to unpack here: first off, if they were normal spinny things, then this separation into two beams is really weird! Because what about an electron that's spinning "forward" or "left"? Why wouldn't nature recognize that mathematically it's spinning just as much clockwise as anticlockwise, vertically, and not deflect it up or down at all? So there should classically be lots of particles deflected between these two beams: it is very strange that this does not happen! In fact we can perform the experiment. We can use a second Stern-Gerlach magnet, this time oriented vertically, so that it deflects electrons into 2 beams going left or right, call these "spin left" and "spin right." Now we take the spin-left electrons and first put them through a vertical Stern-Gerlach magnet, make sure they keep going left, great. We just rotate the magnet and we find half of them go "up" and half of them go "down." Nature doesn't know the difference between "left" and some sort of 50/50 mixture of "up" and "down"; those are the same to Nature, at least where an electron's spin is concerned. And that finding is very robust: "up" is a 50/50 mix of "left" and "right" so if you use another Stern-Gerlach magnet on the electrons that went left and then up, you do NOT see them all go left again! They will all go up if it's horizontal, but they will not all go left if it's vertical. Instead half of them go left and half of them go right!

Now, we have a very folksy understanding of what we mean when we measure these things: we stick a very sensitive electron detector in some place, connect it to a counter, and we watch the counter erratically tick upwards. Of course it is so sensitive that it ticks upwards due to all sorts of other noise sources, even without a signal, but when we turn on the electron gun we start to see that in some places, pointed at the place where the beam hits the gap between the magnets, it starts rising much faster than the noise would provide, and in some places it doesn't rise any faster at all; it's all attributable to noise. That's how we know there are these two beams coming out; we move this detector around and see some peaks in the detection rate.

Now, a lot of our explanations of how the electron can do all of these weird interactions with the magnets, depend on saying that the electron does not just take one path at one time! Instead maybe it is "spread out" in space or it "takes all the paths available to it" or something -- these funky interpretations make the rest mathematics used to describe the electron unbelievably simple, you just have these "unitary transforms" and this "linear evolution" and all of that complicated quantum mechanics stuff is super-simple mathematically. But when we measure, we just see this counter jittering upward with highly unpredictable increments but with some very predictable average rate. Most of those clicks we'd like to think are actual electrons which have made up their mind to take this path or that path and have successfully made it to the counter. How this happens, is something of a mystery. If the electron takes all paths, why does it end up here or there? If it's spread out so that it's half on this detector and half on that detector, why do we see the counter increment and not, say, fuzz between the two numbers, having half-incremented and half-not? Why isn't our world more fuzzy, if it's made out of these fuzzy probabilities and amplitudes at its core? And yet why, when we use scanning tunneling microscopes, do these electron clouds of these atoms look like little balls, as if those electrons really aren't spread out over all that space but occupy one single place all of the time?

The mystery comes because there's a lot of really easy ways to explain this funky Stern-Gerlach stuff, but most of them view the world in a way that's alien to our own. The measurement problem is "we know how measurement works pragmatically, and it never showed us this alien world before, so how is this alien world 'collapsing' into the familiar world that we all know and love?"

(B) Entanglement has to do with strange correlations between remote systems which you can only notice when they are brought back together. My favorite example is a game where 3 people compete as a team in several trials where we secretly put them at cross-purposes to each other, call it "Betrayal." We split the team of 3 people into 3 separate rooms and we prohibit communication between team members. Each room has a screen that we display a goal on, and two buttons labeled 1 and 0. Sometimes the displayed goals for an individual and the actual goals for the team will be at odds; the individual never gets any reward in these cases: it's only, "if the team gracefully recovers from our meddling 100 times in a row, we will give them all a big cash prize."

Okay, so how do these work? Once the people are settled in their rooms, 1/4 of the time we will broadcast a "control round" where we tell them all "make the sum of your three button-presses even," and start a countdown timer. They win if they all push exactly one of their buttons once before the time is up, and the sum of their pushes is even. Really simple. Then 3/4 of the time we will choose one of them at random to be a "traitor" to the other two: we tell the traitor, "make the sum of your three button-presses even," but we tell the others "make the sum of your three button-presses odd," and the team wins only if they each push exactly one of their two buttons once, and the sum is odd."

It's easy to prove that you cannot win this game more than 75% of the time classically; each of the 4 situations is represented by some equation among the 6 correlated random variables, but when you add all 4 equations together you find out that they reduce to 0 = 1, an obvious contradiction, so they can't all be simultaneously satisfied no matter how you correlate the random variables. It is also easy to prove that if they all start out with a class of entangled states called a "GHZ state", such as

    |+++> + |---> = |000> + |011> + |101> + |110>
then they can either measure their state to get an even sum, or any two of them can perform the unitary transform mapping |+> to |+> and also mapping |-> to i |->, yielding the state

    |+++> - |---> = |001> + |010> + |100> + |111>,
and then any measurement must yield an odd sum. The two who are told to make the sum odd can do this with absolutely no help from the one who does nothing to make the sum even. In theory, the only limit to your accuracy is how long you can keep these GHZ states away from outside noise and disturbance. And of course we can account for that by only requesting that you pass, say, only 90% of the trials successfully -- with enough trials we can still prove that a classical team with their 75% upper bound on success in individual trials will almost always fail whereas a quantum team whose tech is good enough to get to a 95% success rate will almost always pass enough trials.

But, you can't use this spooky collaboration to transfer information faster than light. And that's precisely because you can't discover that the two measurements are correlated until you compare them! We instantly correlate but we aren't instantly aware of our correlation; I can't figure that out until you send me a message saying, "hey, is your set of numbers X?" and I say "yes it is! woah! spooky!"

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#87

I posted this in a duplicate thread: For those thinking that this is a step towards faster-than-light (FTL) communication: As far as I know it's fairly certain that quantum entanglement will not allow for FTL communication. Basic principle is that while measurements between both sides will be correlated, it's not possible to tell how they are correlated until both sides compare measurements. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Is "measurement" or "observation" a simplified term for a complex process? It can't be as simple as a human "looking" at something since there's nothing special about humans (that I know of). I really wish I had the time and capability to understood how quantum entanglement really works. It seems a lot like magic if you take the layman explanations at face value.

This link (while lengthy) actually has the chance of leaving you less confused after you read it.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#88
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you destroy the entanglement by destroying one of the entangled particles? You can't do this by shooting it with a particle accelerator, or else the entanglement infects whatever you hit it with; but you could use an intense field like sending a photon into a black hole or an atom into a neutron star to be ripped apart. Is there a rule for describing the entanglement of the resulting constituent particles wit…

> What if you destroy the entanglement That is a very good idea, but doesn't work. The only way to "destroy an entanglement" is to bring the entangled particles back together. http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf or the movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc And if you get through those you might enjoy this one too: http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...

> That doesn't work. The only way to "destroy an entanglement" is to bring the entangled particles back together.

Suppose a proton A is entangled with a proton B. If B hits an anti-proton C, it gets converted into pure energy(maybe light and heat?). If it's impossible to destroy entanglement, then the subsystem consisting of the light and heat must be entangled with the original particle.

Observations:

* The dimension of the vector space has increased, since there may be many constituent photons released. So it may be impossible to assign a specific dimension to any quantum state.

* What is the rule for determining the resulting quantum state? Is there a book or article?

* If you convert a particle entirely into an electromagnetic wave or gravitational waves, and then reconstruct it, does that preserve entanglement? What is the rule for describing how the dimension of the vector space changes as it undergoes multiple transformations? If entanglement is allowed to propagate to a continuous field, then it seems like you'd have an uncountable infinite dimensional vector space to describe its state.

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#89
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "measurement" or "observation" a simplified term for a complex process? It can't be as simple as a human "looking" at something since there's nothing special about humans (that I know of). I really wish I had the time and capability to understood how quantum entanglement really works. It seems a lot like magic if you take the layman explanations at face value.

More people-oriented answers: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3158 Shortest answer to that question: http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/3162 >Imagine at home you put one glove in your coat without looking (and noticing it's only one of the two). After exiting the train you notice it's cold and you pull out that single glove. At this very instant you know it's either the left or the right glove, and you the…

That answer is really missing something because it doesn't predict that Bell's Inequality would be violated.

Re: Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

#90
post #54
post #3

>> Researchers teleport particle of light six kilometres I'm sure they did nothing of the sort. At best they transferred an unknown state of a photon to another photon six kilometers away, then confirmed via measuring both.

Not so fast. There is a good reason to call it quantum teleportation and not quantum facsimile. When you move matter from one place to another it moves, it's not copied. When move classical information (or state) , you can retain the original or multiply it many times. Quantum teleport demonstrates interesing aspects of quantum information that makes it work like material thing. When information (quantum state) moves…

Actually, there is. Sci-fi teleportation removes something in one location, and manifests it in another. Quantum teleportation is much more like taking two human bodies (one yours, one inert) and two throw-away specially prepared human bodies, splitting them up as (you,special) somewhere and (special,inert) somewhere else, and then running a destructive read-local/write-remote operation.

In order to effect Quantum Teleportation, we run a process that literally wrecks one of the specially prepared bodies, _kills you_, and then if the second step of the process is run correctly on the other pair of bodies, wrecks the other specially prepared body and _restores you_ as you were before the cache-and-restore process, in the previously inert body.

And that's only if the second half of the process gets run correctly. It's quantum operations, so any quantum interference may disturb the system and you stay dead forever. Or, in QT terms: entanglement is lost and the information obtained is no longer correlated.

This is so far removed from what non-science considers teleportation that it is a misnomer at best, and a populist term when used outside of science at worst =)

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