Debunked: First object teleported to Earth's orbit [Quantum Communication]

Mick West

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A misleading headline is making people think that a physical object has been teleported from the ground into space, leading to all kinds of excitement and speculation about Star Trek style teleporters.

In fact nothing like that has happened at all, if you actually listen to the BBC piece, you'll find that what has been transmitted is just information. Nothing physical has moved from the ground into space.

There's a similarly misleading story from MIT's Technology Review.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608252/first-object-teleported-from-earth-to-orbit/

First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit
Researchers in China have teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite orbiting more than 500 kilometers above.
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The sub-headline is somewhat less misleading as a photon (a "particle" of light) is not exactly an object. But even here the photon itself (one of an entangled pair of photons) did not magically jump from the ground into space. In fact it traveled there in the normal way by shining a laser up through the atmosphere to a receiver on the satellite or shining a laser from the satellite down to Earth.

There's a much better explanation at Science Magazine:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...ellite-achieves-spooky-action-record-distance
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The confusion here comes down to terminology, as described in Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Quantum teleportation is a process by which quantum information (e.g. the exact state of an atom or photon) can be transmitted (exactly, in principle) from one location to another, with the help of classical communication and previously shared quantum entanglement between the sending and receiving location. Because it depends on classical communication, which can proceed no faster than the speed of light, it cannot be used for faster-than-light transport or communication of classical bits. While it has proven possible to teleport one or more qubits of information between two (entangled) atoms,[1][2][3] this has not yet been achieved between molecules or anything larger.

Although the name is inspired by the teleportation commonly used in fiction, there is no relationship outside the name, because quantum teleportation concerns only the transfer of information. Quantum teleportation is not a form of transport, but of communication; it provides a way of transporting a qubit from one location to another, without having to move a physical particle along with it.
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The reason the satellite "teleportation" is so interesting is that once the quantum information is in space it can be transmitted to other ground stations, or other satellite much more effectively with lasers due to the lack of atmosphere. This allows the creation of a large scale quantum communication network.

What this experiment is really about is secure communication. In particular it can be used as a way for the military to transmit information in a way that would be impossible to intercept (unlike current radio transmissions). This makes it very useful to the military, and explains why the Chinese are doing so much work on it.

It's not a Star Trek teleporter though, sorry.
 
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It is being peer reviewed as we speak
this isn't the right paper? or is "science mag" one of those fake journals?
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6343/1140#

Satellite-based entanglement distribution over 1200 kilometers
  1. Juan Yin1,2,
  2. Yuan Cao1,2,
  3. Yu-Huai Li1,2,
  4. Sheng-Kai Liao1,2,
  5. Liang Zhang2,3,
  6. Ji-Gang Ren1,2,
  7. Wen-Qi Cai1,2,
  8. Wei-Yue Liu1,2,
  9. Bo Li1,2,
  10. Hui Dai1,2,
  11. Guang-Bing Li1,2,
  12. Qi-Ming Lu1,2,.............
+ See all authors and affiliations

Science 16 Jun 2017:
Vol. 356, Issue 6343, pp. 1140-1144
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3211
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this isn't the right paper? or is "science mag" one of those fake journals?
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6343/1140#

Satellite-based entanglement distribution over 1200 kilometers
  1. Juan Yin1,2,
  2. Yuan Cao1,2,
  3. Yu-Huai Li1,2,
  4. Sheng-Kai Liao1,2,
  5. Liang Zhang2,3,
  6. Ji-Gang Ren1,2,
  7. Wen-Qi Cai1,2,
  8. Wei-Yue Liu1,2,
  9. Bo Li1,2,
  10. Hui Dai1,2,
  11. Guang-Bing Li1,2,
  12. Qi-Ming Lu1,2,.............
+ See all authors and affiliations

Science 16 Jun 2017:
Vol. 356, Issue 6343, pp. 1140-1144
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3211
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I have no idea whether science mag is fake news or not, I myself do not refer to it and indeed have never heard of it till now.
 
I have no idea whether science mag is fake news or not, I myself do not refer to it and indeed have never heard of it till now.

Science is one of the oldest, largest, and most highly respected science journals in existence.
http://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-1997-current-issue


Science

The world's leading journal of original scientific research

JOURNAL SCOPE
Founded in 1880 with the support of American inventor Thomas Edison, Science has grown to become the world’s leading publication for cutting-edge research, scientific news, and commentary, with the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general-science journal.

PUBLICATION FEATURES
  • Original peer-reviewed Research Articles.
  • News and editorial coverage, including Special Issues, Editorials, weekly news, and Perspectives on scientific developments written by scientists.
  • Reference links to citations and related resources in MEDLINE/PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, EMBASE, HighWire Press, and CrossRef.
  • Article citation in Web of Science, Scopus, HighWire Press, and CrossRef.
  • Toll-free access to all HighWire Press journal articles that are referenced in Science.
  • International in scope, with 40 percent of corresponding authors based outside of the U.S.
  • 2014 impact factor of 33.61 and five-year impact factor of 35.26.
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Science is one of the oldest, largest, and most highly respected science journals in existence.

Yes. It's generally considered pretty prestigious to get an article published in Science. It's typically reserved for the highest impact, most exciting results.
 
Does current scientific elite understand by which mechanism two particles/vawes get entangled? To my understanding, all those spooky actions at a distance are happening in a somehow closed system created by experimenter which could itself explain entanglement.
 
Many particle interactions can cause entanglement. For example, the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect and collision cascades happen naturally, though in less observable and manipulatable ways. For less weird events, the electron cloud around any atom with more than one electron is an entangled system, and transition spectroscopy has shown that the photosynthesis process involves entangled photons, which in turn explained why it was so much more efficient than traditional stoichiometric chemistry suggested should be possible.


It's true that a lot of what we know (or rather, confirmed from the Standard Model predictions) comes from extremely controlled conditions, but it's less that those conditions are required for entanglement and more that observation and manipulation requires systems with very few particles that are safe from interaction by outside particles. We can tell that entanglement occurs in photosynthesis, but we can't really do anything about it because of all the numerous different particles "contaminating" the field.
 
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