Race is on to make quantum teleportation a reality 04 October 12 by Adam Mann There is an international quantum teleportation space race heating

up. Around th e world, countries are investing time and money into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and could profo undly change worldwide communication. This is not a maybe-sort-of-one-day quantum technology. Quantum teleportation ha s been proven experimentally many times over and researchers are now eyeing the heavens as their next big leap forward. Most of what remains are the nuts and bo lts engineering challenges (and some more money) before it becomes a thing of th e present. Though it may be disappointing to hear, quantum teleportation is not about insta ntly sending a person or object between two places -- this is no "Beam me up, Sc otty," or "Bampf!" Instead, the technique involves the perhaps even freakier tas k of separating a subatomic particle from its quantum state. "Once you disembody the state of one of particle, you can then recreate the part icle in remote copy," said physicist and computer scientist Charles Bennett of IBM, who co-authored the first paper on quantum teleportation in 1993. Though the team's paper was purely theoretical at the time, scientists since th en have done many experiments teleporting particles over longer and longer dista nces. In the past year, a team from China and another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open air o ver 97 and 143 kilometres, respectively. This is many times farther than the pre vious record of 16 miles, set in 2010 by the same Chinese team. With scientists extending quantum teleportation to such distances, many are already considering the next step: zapping particles and information from an orbiting satellite to a relay station on Earth. If developed, quantum teleportation satellites could allow spies to pass large a mounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers -- which would be smaller and exponentially more powerfu l than modern computers, able to model complex phenomenon, rapidly crunch number s, and render modern encryption keys useless -- they would need quantum teleport ers in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the internet. China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payloa d in 2016 and the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years. Con spicuously, the US is far behind the pack because of a bureaucratic reshuffling that left quantum communication research experiments without government support in 2008. Whoever loses this new competition could fail to capitalise on the prom ise of quantum communication altogether. How It works The trick to teleportation comes from a quirk of quantum mechanics that allows y ou to create two particles that are completely in tune with one another, which a re known as an entangled pair. Let's say you have two entangled photons and you are measuring their polarisatio n, or the direction in which they are oscillating. If one photon has a vertical polarisation, you know the other one is going to be exactly the same. The troubl e is that quantum mechanics works on probability -- before you measure a particl e's polarisation it is equally likely to be horizontal or vertical. According to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles exist in some stran

ge simultaneous vertical/horizontal state until you make a measurement. With an entangled pair, you can just measure one particle, and no matter how far away th e other one is from the first, it will instantly gain whatever property you meas ured. "It's like two people play dice and they always get the same result; it's always random but they always get the same result," said physicist Rupert Ursin of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who works with one team that set the re cent distance record. Of course, even with such dice, there's no way to compose a signal or transfer i nformation. You could give your friend one die and tell him to stand in another room, agreeing beforehand on a binary system where rolling an even number means zero and an odd number means one. But because the outcome of each roll is random , all your friend would end up doing is sending you a haphazard string of zeroes and ones. To send a controllable signal, you need quantum teleportation. This requires thr ee subatomic particles, say photons. Two of the photons are entangled with one a nother, and the third contains the bit of information you want to send. For a si mple example of how this works, let's say you place one photon from the entangle d pair in Los Angeles and the other in New York. In LA, a scientist measures one of the entangled photons and the third particle at the same time. She doesn't find out their exact properties but just their rel ative ones -- if they are the same or opposite one another -- and the particles get destroyed during this measurement. Let's say she discovers that the particle s are opposites and relays this information to her New York colleague. He then m easures his entangled photon and knows that the opposite of that measurement is the bit of information he was meant to receive. Another way to explain it involves a CIA-interrogation analogy that Charles Benn ett, co-author of the first quantum teleportation study, likes to use. Imagine t hat a woman named Alice who lives in Seattle has uncovered information that the CIA desperately needs to thwart an attack. The CIA wants to interrogate her and they need to be able to do it at their headquarters in Washington D.C. Trouble i s, Alice doesn't want to come to DC and nothing will persuade her to do so. But the CIA happens to have a pair of magical twin agents named Romulus and Remus wh o always answer yes or no questions exactly the same way. So the CIA sends agent Remus to Seattle, not to interrogate Alice, but just to l earn if she gets along with Remus. The two meet and get to know each other. Alic e discovers that she hates Remus. Every question that she would have answered ye s to in life, he answers no. So now all Remus has to do is tell his boss back at headquarters that his and Alice's answers are opposite. Now the CIA can simply question Romulus to get the information they need. But just as Romulus and Remus started out together in DC, quantum teleportation scientists usually don't have entangled particle pairs just sitting around in tw o different locations. During an experiment, researchers will often generate an entangled pair in one place. They measure the state of one of the entangled part icles and compare that to a third particle containing the bit of data to be sent . They then use a laser beam to send the information about the particles' relati ve states, along with the second entangled particle, to another location. Because subatomic particles are sensitive and small, they're liable to get lost, meaning that experimenters have to be careful about their protocols. The first quantum teleportation experiments involved sending particles across small spaces , on the order of inches. Eventually, researchers figured out how to shoot a par ticle a few metres, and then hundreds of metres.

"Now we want to show that this kind of communication might be useful on a global scale," said physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, who led the Austrian quantum-distance team. "The method of choice is to use quantum communi cation via satellite," he added, since photons can't travel very far in glass fi bre without getting absorbed.