A team of research scientists in China have successfully teleported a photon from Earth to an orbiting satellite for the first time, paving the way for new fantastic breakthroughs.
According to research published in the online on the open access site arXiv, the team used process known as quantum entanglement. For months, the team teleported millions of photons from their ground station in Tibet to an orbiting satellite. They were successful in 900 cases. “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,” the team said in a statement, according to MIT Technology Review.
The MIT Technology Review, which reviewed the study, described quantum entanglement as a “strange phenomenon” that 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,” it said. Quantum teleportation uses quantum entanglement — a situation where one set of particles is dependent on the state of another. In principle, if scientists create specific sets of particles that are capable of being rearranged into whatever they wish to teleport, they can send partial information about one end of the entanglement — encoded as a quantum state — and thereby produce it in the other end.
This comes a year after scientists were able to teleport an object outside of a laboratory setting. This is very exciting for those of us who want to live in a science fiction universe.
For more on the science, check out the video below.