Quantum teleportation

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Posted October 28th, 2008 in Quantum 3. Tags: , , , .

Teleportation, a term originally coined by science fiction, refers to a hypothetical technology that can transport objects (or, eventually, people) nearly instantaneously from one location to another without sending the object through the intervening space. Classically, one might approach this problem by attempting to record the states of all the particles constituting the object to be teleported; that information could then be transmitted to a distant receiver and used to reconstitute the object out of raw materials available at the receiver. For many years this approach to teleportation was considered implausible because of quantum mechanical concerns. For instance, a teleportation device must somehow record the precise positions and momenta of all atoms in an object in order to reconstruct the object on the other side. This simultaneous measurement of non-commuting observables is forbidden by the uncertainty principle. A more fundamental problem exists, though, which is evident even in situations where the uncertainty principle is not directly applicable. To illustrate this point, consider the teleportation of a two-state system, such as the polarization state of a single photon…

To continue reading, please download the PDF version. I’ve also created a Powerpoint presentation that may help you understand the Boschi teleporation experiment described in the PDF. Make sure to watch the presentation in Slide Show mode (i.e. full screen) otherwise you’ll miss the animations which should make the experiment (a little) clearer.

Note: This post is unfinished. I intend to transcribe the latex that creates the PDF to HTML using TtH once I figure out how to use it.

Last modified February 6th, 2012
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2 Responses to “Quantum teleportation”

  1. I have to correct the sentence in the paper where I claim that using current technology to teleport an entire human would take longer than the age of the universe. I’ve been unable to track down the source for that statement, and more recently I’ve learned that classical communication bitrate requirements only grow as the logarithm of the number of atoms. So I retract that statement.

  2. Wang et al. 2014 teleports both spin and orbital angular momentum of a single photon. Here’s more information.

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