Teleportation Between Electrons? University Research Suggests So

Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world

Key points…

+  Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”—also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement—one of the basic of concepts of quantum physics—the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly “teleports” its state to the two entangled particles.

“We provide evidence for ‘entanglement swapping,’ in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and ‘quantum gate teleportation,’ a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation,” Nichol says. “Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.”

+  In order to demonstrate quantum teleportation using electrons, the researchers harnessed a recently developed technique based on the principles of Heisenberg exchange coupling. An individual electron is like a bar magnet with a north pole and a south pole that can point either up or down. The direction of the pole—whether the north pole is pointing up or down, for instance—is known as the electron’s magnetic moment or quantum spin state. If certain kinds of particles have the same magnetic moment, they cannot be in the same place at the same time. That is, two electrons in the same quantum state cannot sit on top of each other. If they did, their states would swap back and forth in time.

+  The results pave the way for future research on quantum teleportation involving spin states of all matter, not just photons, and provide more evidence for the surprisingly useful capabilities of individual electrons in qubit semiconductors.

Source:  University of Rochester.  Lindsey Valich, Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world…

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