Researchers in China have teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite orbiting more than 500 kilometers above. Last year, a Long March 2D rocket took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert carrying a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher who died in 391 B.C. The rocket placed Micius in a Sun-synchronous orbit so that it passes over the same point on Earth at the same time each day. Micius is a highly sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. That’s important because it should allow scientists to test the technological building blocks for various quantum feats such as entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation. Today, the Micius team announced the results of its first experiments. The team created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, in the process smashing the record for the longest distance over which entanglement has been measured. And they’ve used this quantum network to teleport the first object from the ground to orbit. Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function. The curious thing about entanglement is that this shared existence continues even when the photons are separated by vast distances. So a measurement on one immediately influences the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them. Back in the 1990s, scientists realized they could use this link to transmit quantum information from one point in the universe to another. The idea is to “download” all the information associated with one photon in one place and transmit it over an entangled link to another photon in another place. This second photon then takes on the identity of the first. To all intents and purposes, it becomes the first photon. That’s the nature of teleportation and it has been performed many times in labs on Earth. Teleportation is a building block for a wide range of technologies. “Long-distance teleportation has been recognized as a fundamental element in protocols such as large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation,” says the Chinese team. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608252/first-object-teleported-from-earth-to-orbit/
First object teleported to Earth's orbit Chinese researchers have teleported a photon from the Gobi desert to a satellite orbiting five hundred kilometres above the earth. This is achieved through quantum entanglement, a process where two particles react as one with no physical connection between them. Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford University Ian Walmsley tells the World At One how quantum entanglement works and how teleportation could be utilised.
Inquiring minds want to know: Why couldn't the first object teleported to outer space have been Donald Trump?
