Scientists teleport first object ever from Earth into space

I think short range teleportation of similarly small matter has been around for decades, but that range is significant.

Can't help but think of both humanitarian and military capacity. Imagine transporting water immediately to a drought zone. Or putting nerve gas in the midst of a military installation.
 
thaddeus6th said:
I think short range teleportation of similarly small matter has been around for decades, but that range is significant.

Can't help but think of both humanitarian and military capacity. Imagine transporting water immediately to a drought zone. Or putting nerve gas in the midst of a military installation.
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Yeah we have a ways to go before that happens, but honestly thought it was impossible to do such long range distances.
 
So far as I understand it, there was no "teleportation" - but instead the experiment used entanglement, a basic feature of Quantum ElectroDynamics.

I think the point of note of the story is that the distance is apparently greater than anything done before with this - but the dressing it up as "teleportation" is just sexing the story up unnecessarily.

2c. :)
 
What the Chinese have done has been done before although never at that distance, but it is not teleportation, that's actually a pretty bad descriptor of the process. Essentially this is information replication - the physical particles already exist it is just their measured states which don't, it works on the principle of Quantum Indeterminacy, namely that the state of the particle can't be known until measured.

I honestly don't think the distance really matters (in terms of how this works I think the distances could be anything) and I think the Chinese are just a bit ahead of the game. It has huge potential for Communications and to be honest there are papers that talk about it revolutionizing the networks - imagine an encryption key that was completely uncrackable because the decryption key only existed in a point of time and space.

I wish it was really teleportation but it isn't. What the article fails to also mention is that the property of the "master" photon was measured and not set by the research team, in other words the information sent is random to the measurement at the moment.

Still, the slow grind of progress moves ever onwards.
 
Ah, quantum physics. Or 'magic', as it sometimes sounds like.
 
A photon — a tiny sub-atomic particle — was "transported" from the Gobi Desert to China's Micius satellite some 310 miles above the surface.
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Never having been to China, let alone the Gobi Desert, I can't match this achievement...

...but I have sent many photons into space while not being fully in control of a torch on a cloudless night....

What I haven't done is make an instantaneous change to a particle already in space... which isn't remotely like "transporting" an object into space....
 
I saw the report on this a little while ago (it might even have been here in Chrons). My understanding is that @Brian G Turner and @SilentRoamer are correct; this was not teleportation (or at least not as we know it in popular media) though transportation was the hardest part. The problem was to generate the two entangled photons and then the hard part; to transport one of them to the satellite and capture it there. Essentially, I think, they had to fire a laser at the satellite that sent just that one single proton and then capture that photon that is capture it without absorbing it. Then a change of state in one photon will be mirrored in the other. The trouble is that if you fire a single photon at, say, a satellite the chances are it will be absorbed by striking some molecule on the way which is no use.

There's a much more complete report here China Shatters "Spooky Action at a Distance" Record, Preps for Quantum Internet and you'll notice that it is from a month ago.
 
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My toothbrush has gone missing. Are the chinese beaming random stuff into space as a practical joke now?
 
dask said:
Probably a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway: how can we measure a particle if we don't know what its state is?
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No that's the whole point we absolutely can measure all those properties; it's state.

And Incidentally I think I got the highlighted comment below wrong:
I saw the report on this a little while ago (it might even have been here in Chrons). My understanding is that @Brian G Turner and @SilentRoamer are correct; this was not teleportation (or at least not as we know it in popular media) though transportation was the hardest part. The problem was to generate the two entangled photons and then the hard part; to transport one of them to the satellite and capture it there. Essentially, I think, they had to fire a laser at the satellite that sent just that one single proton and then capture that photon that is capture it without absorbing it. Then a change of state in one photon will be mirrored in the other. The trouble is that if you fire a single photon at, say, a satellite the chances are it will be absorbed by striking some molecule on the way which is no use.
Click to expand...
With a little more reading I believe what they are doing is creating the entangled particles on the satellite and then sending them down to base stations on Earth and those base stations can then communicate using the entanglement. As explained below:

Micius carries in its heart an assemblage of crystals and lasers that generates entangled photon pairs then splits and transmits them on separate beams to ground stations in its line-of-sight on Earth. For the latest test, the three receiving stations were located in the cities of Delingha and Ürümqi—both on the Tibetan Plateau—as well as in the city of Lijiang in China’s far southwest. At 1,203 kilometers, the geographical distance between Delingha and Lijiang is the record-setting stretch over which the entangled photon pairs were transmitted.

For now the system remains mostly a proof of concept, because the current reported data transmission rate between Micius and its receiving stations is too low to sustain practical quantum communications. Of the roughly six million entangled pairs that Micius’s crystalline core produced during each second of transmission, only about one pair per second reached the ground-based detectors after the beams weakened as they passed through Earth’s atmosphere and each receiving station’s light-gathering telescopes. Team leader Jian-Wei Pan compares the feat with detecting a single photon from a lone match struck by someone standing on the moon. Even so, he says, Micius’s transmission of entangled photon pairs is “a trillion times more efficient than using the best telecommunication fibers. … We have done something that was absolutely impossible without the satellite.”
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