2014 is going to be the year of teleportation. Kiss expensive air travel and car pooling to work goodbye forever, teleporting is the transportation wave of the future. Okay, obviously we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, nobody is going to be beaming Scotty up just yet — but teleport technology is happening.
Researchers at TU Delft’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience have successfully teleported data from one place to another. The Netherlands-based team claims to have teleported data by particle entanglement across a distance of 10 feet without the data having ever traveled through the intervening space.
It’s pretty heady stuff, but basically when two particles that carry the same information spin, those particles become affected and can be merged across time and space. Gizmag spoke one of the team’s leaders, Ronald Hanson about the data teleportation.
“When two particles become entangled, their identities merge: their collective state is precisely determined, but the individual identity of each of the particles has disappeared. The entangled particles behave as one, even when separated by a large distance.”
“As electrons in an atom exist in orbits around a nucleus – like the way that the Earth spins on its axis – electrons also have “spin.”
Ten feet may not seem like a great distance, but according to the researchers, the distance is irrelevant and it could have just as easily been 10 light-years. This is because one entangled electron has its spin direction changed, the other electron immediately reverses the direction of its own spin. The data that the team teleported was information contained in one quantum bit (or qubit, the quantum analog of a standard computer bit).
While the teleportation of physical objects isn’t anywhere near possible, the team does see this as the future of quantum network communication and is next going to try to teleport data a distance of 4,200 feet with chips in several buildings.
In the meantime, we’re going to keep hoping for that Wonka-Vision teleportation project Willy Wonka was working on.
