Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting between ions in different traps.
The original paper in the January 23rd issue of Science: Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits, S. Olmschenk, D. N. Matsukevich, P. Maunz, D. Hayes, L.-M. Duan, and C. Monroe. Official press release here.
New York Times article. My favorite quote:
The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information."We need to work on that," Dr. Monroe said.
Scientific American article. With a great quote from one of the graduate students involved:
Olmschenk agrees. "If you want to use this for real quantum communication purposes," he says, "we'd like it to go much faster." Toward that end, he says that small improvements in collecting and detecting the photons emitted by the ions, which are used to establish ion-to-ion entanglement, could provide a major boost in teleportation efficiency.
Am I the only one who, when they hear "we'd like it to go much faster" think of all the hours put in by the graduate student?
Ars Technica gets win the funky title award: Spooky memory at a distance with quantum teleportation.
Fox New totally flubs it up Scientist Teleport Matter More Than Three Feet. I hope you can see what's the matter with this title (not to mention this: "What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B" which I don't quite buy.)
Popular Science makes the best Star Trek reference: Beam Me Up Ytterbium, but really is there some sort of cut and paste for the phrase "...scientists take an important step towards the still far-off goal of quantum computing?"
But by far the best, IMHO, is Science News who manages to bring in a "bar joke":
A qubit walks into a bar, unsure of whether to order drink A or drink B. If the bartender asks the qubit what it wants, the qubit will collapse and be destroyed. But now researchers can instantly teleport the original, intact qubit to another "bar" far away.
Congrats to the Maryland (and Michigan) team on the cool experiment. Any hopes we will be slamming both the detection loophole and the locality loophole shut at the same time?
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As I mentioned here, Chris is on the Executive Committee of the APS GQI. As Vice-Chair you need to improve your promotional skills. :))
Beautiful experiment! ... and cue the cliches in the popular press. ;-)
I am sure people will tear QM a new loophole, based on the efficiency of entanglement creation, which is rather low in this experiment (hence the 10 minute bit rate).
" . . . no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B."
This paper (Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems -- http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9906007) by Deutsch and Hayden argues, among other things, that in quantum teleportation, quantum information is transmitted through 'classical' (i.e. decoherent) information channels.
Since my previous post was sucked up by the Spamilator (due to excessive links) I will repeat without links: since you are Vice-Chair of APS GQI you should get in the habit of promoting the group. Chris Monroe happens to be on our Executive Committee. Thus, a perfect opportunity to shamelessly promote APS GQI.
A qubit walks into a bar, unsure of whether to order drink A or drink B.
(1) The bartender says: "I think you want to go upstairs. You're a state vector in a two-level quantum-mechanical system."
(2) The bartender says: "Is this Casual Friday or what? How come you're so informally dressed if you're formally equivalent to a two-dimensional vector space over the complex numbers?"
(3) The bartender says: "That lady at the far end of the bar wants you to buy her a drink, and that guy at the other end wants to punch your lights out. I don't want any trouble here, so can you deal with both of them at once, via superposition?"
(4) The bartender says: "That lady at the far end of the bar has a push-up bra, if you ket my drift..."
(5) The bartender asks: "Have you ever had the sensation that you're in Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" and this is that setting for some of the scenes, the Rotating Vector?"
(6) The bartender says: "Watch your step. The last guy tripped and fell face-down on the floor because of all those Bloch spheres under foot."