It’s
official: Researchers in China just teleported the first object ever
from the ground to orbit. We wrote about this study in a recent article
we published, going more into the entanglement aspect, which could mean
instantaneous transmission of information or that information is
travelling faster than the speed of light. You can read that article here.
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A year ago, a Long March 2D rocket was
launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert
containing a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese
philosopher. MIT Technology Review
describes Micius as a “highly sensitive photon receiver that can detect
the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground” and
explains that “that’s important because it should allow scientists to
test the technological building blocks for various quantum feats such as
entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation.”
The team created the quantum network in
order to use it to teleport objects from Earth to orbit. Earlier this
week, the Chinese research team presented their initial findings from
their first experiment.
To conduct the experiment, the
researchers created two entangled photons, then beamed one of them to
the satellite while keeping the other at ground level. They then
measured them both to ensure they were still entangled, confirming they
could teleport protons using this method.
Over the following month, they sent millions more photons into orbit, finding positive results in almost 1,000 of the tests.
“We report the first quantum
teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground
observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite—through an up-link channel—
with a distance up to 1400 km,” explained the Chinese team.
“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,”
stated the team.
A Deeper Look at Teleportation, At The Non-Material Level
When many people think of teleportation,
they likely visualize people travelling from country to country and
planet to planet in an instant, similar to how teleportation is
portrayed in Hollywood. Sure, it would be super cool if we could
actually do that, but how far away are we from achieving that, or will
we ever even reach that point?
Teleportation can theoretically occur
due to quantum entanglement. This happens when two quantum objects,
like photons, form at the same time and place in space and thus
technically have “the same existence.” In other words, they have the
same wave function. The interesting part is that even when separated
afterward, regardless of how far apart they are, they still share the
same existence.
In the 1990s, researchers started
studying this link more intensely, trying to use it to send quantum
information from one point to another. Essentially, you can download all
of the data to one photon and then transmit it, thanks to quantum
entanglement, to another photon. In other words, the second photon would
literally become the first photon. This is how teleportation is being
studied currently in regards to quantum entanglement.
Teleportation in general has been studied for decades in quantum physics labs all over the world and by the U.S. government. A declassified US Air Force report on teleportation, which was made available through the Federation of American Scientists, has helped confirm this.
The document describes numerous studies
on teleportation in the U.S. and other countries. Here’s a description
of one experiment from the report:
In September 1981, an extraordinary paper was published in the PRC in the journal Ziran Zazhi (transl.: Nature Journal), and this paper was entitled, “Some Experiments on the Transfer of Objects Performed by Unusual Abilities of the Human Body” (Shuhuang et al., 1981). The paper reported that gifted children were able to cause the apparent teleportation of small objects (radio micro-transmitters, photosensitive paper, mechanical watches, horseflies, other insects, etc.) from one location to another (that was meters away) without them ever touching the objects beforehand.
So, what would the U.S. government use
teleportation for? In the report, they proposed using it for military
operations in space, perhaps alluding to the war in space (read more
about that in our CE article here). The document states:
Future space explorers and their equipment will need to easily and quickly travel from an orbiting spacecraft to the surface of some remote planet in order to get their work done, or military personnel in the United States need to easily and quickly travel from their military base to another remote location on Earth in order to participate in a military operation, or space colonists will need quick transport to get from Earth to their new home planet. Instead of using conventional transportation to expedite travel the space explorer, military personnel or space colonist and/or their equipment go into the “Teleporter” (a.k.a. “Transporter” in Star Trek lingo) and are “beamed down” or “beamed over” to their destinations at light speed.
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