Scientists 'Teleport' a Particle Hundreds of Miles--But

What Does That Mean?

RYAN F. MANDELBAUM

Humanity is advancing rapidly towards a place where the news sounds an awful lot like
science fiction. In fact, yesterday, Chinese scientists reported that they teleported a
photon over hundreds of miles using a quantum satellite. But this isnt Star Trek. Its the
real world.

Which happens to mean its a lot less exciting than Star Trek-style teleportation,
unfortunately. But its still really cool, I promise!

This quantum teleportation doesnt actually involve teleporting a real objectits not
really teleportation at all. The scientists are actually sending information about a particle of
light in a way that can only be accessed by two observers. This could have major
implications for the future of computingit would make for incredible data encryption. But
encryption with this technology is still pretty far off.

Still, the researchers write in their new paper, 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. Lets walk through what that means.

Last summer, China launched a satellite, called Micius, designed to test communications
based on the principles of quantum mechanics over large distances. They released their
first results last month, demonstrating that they could entangle particles over record
distanceshundreds of kilometers.

Entanglement is a consequence of the fact that in quantum physics, the scientific theory
governing the smallest particles, humans cant determine photons exact properties until
they look at them. Before we make an observation of a particle, we only get probabilities
describing what the particle might look like. Im just going to steal an analogy I used
yesterday, where photons are balls, and their colors (red or green) are analogous to their
properties.

... Lets say there are two bags, and each has one of two balls, red or green. You give a
bag to your friend.

Quantum mechanics only gives the probabilities that your bag contains either ball color,
and thats all you know before making the observation. At human scales, each bag already
contains a red or green ball.

But, because our balls are photons, they become entangled:

Quantum mechanics says both balls are red and green at the same timeuntil you look.
Thats weird on its own, but it gets worse. If you look at your ball, the other ball
automatically takes on the other color.
What the Chinese satellite did was use lasers and crystals to bestow light particles with
one of two available properties, in this case, polarization states, entangle them, and
separate them between 500 and 1400 kilometers, or 310 to 870 miles. Essentially, they
prepared the two bags with the red/green balls.

Once the researchers have these particles entangled over a distance, they can take
advantage of their link to send secrets between the bag holders, which is what their new
paper, posted on the arXiv physics preprint server, claims to have done.

So, heres a simplified version of quantum teleportation. Lets say you take a red and a
green ball, put each randomly into one of two bags, and hand one bag to a person on the
ground, and another to a person at the satellite. But on the ground, theres a second bag,
containing another green ball that the folks on the ground want to teleport to the satellite,
without anyone else knowing it was green. Quantum teleportation says that, with the
entangled link already set up, the folks on the ground have only to open both of their bags,
then call the satellite on the phone and say either same or different. If the ground
observer opens both bags and sees both balls are green, she can just say same to the
satellite. The satellite will then open his entangled bag, which has to have a red ball, which
means the ground must have had the green ball in the entangled bag, and that means the
secret ball had to be green.

Thus, the state of the secret ball is teleported to the satellite.

This is an oversimplification, but gets to the main point, that only the information, and not
the particle itself, is teleported, without actually having to tell anyone whats in the secret
bag. And it still requires some non-quantum communicationthe exchanging of a secret
one-time key. Scientists have done this sort of teleportation before over fiber optic
cables, but this is the furthest distance and the first time its been done from the ground to
a satellite, rather than between places on Earth.

Matthew Leifer, physicist from Chapman University who helped me with the ball analogy,
didnt feel comfortable speaking to the specifics of the experiment as a theoretical
physicist, but said: If your goal is to create some kind of quantum cryptography network,
then using a [quantum satellite] to do it would be a significant step forward. That is, if you
wanted to send encrypted data over a satellite network like this, and if what the team says
theyve done is correct, then it would be a significant advance.

Leifer pointed out that the fidelitythe quality of the received signalwas not as high as in
ground-based experiments. And, for the millions of photons sent, the researchers only
confirmed their results in 911 cases. according to an MIT Technology Review story on the
paper. On top of that, the paper hasnt been peer-reviewed by other scientists, so its
important to take its conclusions with a little caution, in case something changes when a
journal publishes the final manuscript.

Still, sending quantum-encrypted data would be exciting for anyone hoping to set up a
satellite network based on this principle.