The First Universal Quantum Network 156
MrSeb writes "German scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have created the first 'universal quantum network' that could be feasibly scaled up to become a quantum internet. So far their quantum network only spans two labs spaced 21 meters apart, but the scientists stress that longer distances and multiple nodes are possible. The network's construction is ingenious: Each node is represented by a single rubidium atom, trapped inside a reflective optical cavity. These atoms communicate with each other by emitting a single photon over an optical fiber. Each atom is a quantum bit — a qubit — and the polarization of the photon emitted carries the quantum state of the qubit. The receiving qubit absorbs the photon and takes on the quantum state of the transmitter. Voila: A network of qubits that can send, receive, and store quantum information. In another, probably more exciting test, the emitted photons were actually used to entangle the rubidium atoms."
I have no idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no idea what any of that means! or what it's ultimate implications are technologically speaking but it sounds awesome!
Anyone care to enlighten me on the subject?
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It means that one day people will learn the difference between its and it's. Ah, to dream....
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Wow, its awesome!!
Re:I have no idea (Score:4, Funny)
Really, really fast porn downloads.
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But you'll have no way of telling whether a video is Goatse or not-Goatse until you watch it and collapse the state vector.
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Nice
Re:I have no idea (Score:5, Funny)
But you'll have no way of telling whether a video is Goatse or not-Goatse until you watch it and collapse the state vector.
Ah, Schrodinger's Goatse. Brought to you be the intersection of quantum mechanics and 4chan. Where physics and the dark, underbelly of the internet meet, even brave men fear to tread.
Re:I have no idea (Score:5, Funny)
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I have no idea what they mean too but to my understanding cause I didn't take any physics class (too busy screwing the girls back then). I think the "ultimate" goal or one of them is to create a zero latency network to any distance.
Entangled qubits might be able to form the basis of a quantum network with zero latency over any distance, which would make it rather useful for the intergalactic Galnet that will eventually succeed the internet.
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Entanglement Confusion (Score:2)
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But without latency, what will the losing team blame it on?
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So...
Even faster troll first pots?
Nuts to that!
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When I read the title I got all exited thinking it would be just this: a quantum entanglement network :(
Call me when we have instant transfer of data (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be impressed when they figure out how to harness entangled particles to achieve instant transfer of information over vast distances.
Imagine a world with no RF generated, yet completely connected. Better yet... imagine the entire solar system or beyond connected with such a network.
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Sorry, not gonna happen. You might as well unplug the phone if that's the call you're waiting for.
Violating relativity is not on anybody's todo list; entanglement has many useful properties, but you still can't break the speed of light barrier with it, and that isn't an implementation issue.
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Yes, the "effects" of entanglement occur faster than the speed of light, but this cannot be used to transfer information in any way (this is a mathematically proven consequence of the principles of QM), so FTL communication is still physically impossible in a quantum universe.
Re:Call me when we have instant transfer of data (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but entanglement cannot violate causality, which is basically what would happen if you transmit information faster than the speed of light. That means that entanglement itself *could* be faster than light, but it has to have some property that mangles any information you try to piggy back on the process so that it is useless as a communication source at FTL speeds.
The problem isn't getting something faster than light, it's being able to make any use of the process to transmit information.
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Uh, yes you can. Entanglement is order of magnitude faster than the speed of light. It has nothing to with light however. Experiments have been done to see how "fast" it is.
Stop posting this bullshit. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Entanglement does not get around this.
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This is a question - not an argument...
But isn't entanglement itself a known reality? Haven't they shown that two entangled particles are in sync - that one particle reflects the state of another instantly? So, doesn't that imply that the information IS traveling faster than the speed of light? Doesn't the information about the state of the particle that changes have to travel to the other particle?
I am aware that probably behind the scenes distance is an illusion in this case and the two particles are just
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I think it is one of the deepest questions of today:
1) if particles really do not have well defined properties until they're measured (i.e. they exist as a probabilistic waveform until they are measured and that waveform collapses to a definitive set of values) then yes, presumably the two entangled particles have communicated faster than light.
2) If however, the probability aspect of quantum physics represents the fact that we are still nowhere near the truth, and that our current theories are approximatio
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"instant" meaning at the speed of light? It's theoretically impossible to transfer information any faster than that.
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I thought the rule was anything containing mass could be accelerated past the speed of light. The whole point of entangled atoms, was that the state of one atom was changed, the state of the entangled pair changed to match, and that this change was instantaneous. If the 2 atoms could be moved lightyears apart then you could have (even if it's primitive Morse code) instant transfer of information. Because the information has no mass, you are not breaking the light barrier.
That's the basis of the Ansible [wikipedia.org] in E
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IIRC, anything with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light with an infinite amount of energy. Anything without mass has a maximum speed of the speed of light.
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"anything with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light with an infinite amount of energy."
Except e = mc2 suggests that were you to do so the object being accelerated would acquire an infinite mass.
And would so consume the universe.
"Anything without mass has a maximum speed of the speed of light."
Also, anything without mass would have a minimum speed of the c. The slightest force it received would cause it accelerate at maximum (infinite) acceleration.
f = ma, so a = f/m, so possibly it would cause infi
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This is the angle I'm thinking. Information has no mass so there for it should not be affect by relativity. Please explain how I'm wrong.
No, really explain how I'm wrong. I would rather know I'm wrong about something to keep thinking it was right.
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One way to think about it is that to send information faster than light will break causality and that leads to loads of paradoxes.
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Okay, I think I understand from reading the article and the comments here. You can't entangle the particles and use them to send information because the process of reading the information changes the state of the particles. Its the Heisenberg uncertainty principal at work. For some reason I didn't put these two together just now.
Can't we just couple up the Heisenberg compensator and call it good?
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Define speed of light.
If you are measuring a distance in 3D space and the time it takes? yes.
If quantum entanglement exists in 5,6 or even 7D space, the entanglement distance may not be anywhere as far as the 3D space distance.
Therefore it IS possible in relation to the observer and based on 3D space constraints to transmit information faster than the speed of light without violating Causality.
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Define speed of light.
If you are measuring a distance in 3D space and the time it takes? yes.
If quantum entanglement exists in 5,6 or even 7D space, the entanglement distance may not be anywhere as far as the 3D space distance.
Therefore it IS possible in relation to the observer and based on 3D space constraints to transmit information faster than the speed of light without violating Causality.
Wow you're dumb.
Imagine a 2D plane. Imagine 2 points, A and B, on that plane. They are X units apart.
Find a path from A to B whose length is shorter than X. Feel free to use as many dimensions as you want.
Furthermore, there is exactly zero evidence that more than 3 spatial dimensions exist.
fold the plane over so A and B touch (Score:2)
If you're allowed to use more than 2 dimensions, fold the plane over on itself so that points A and B touch. Now the distance is zero.
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If you're allowed to use more than 2 dimensions, fold the plane over on itself so that points A and B touch. Now the distance is zero.
Okay then, have fun folding space at a rate faster than the speed of light.
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It helps to be civil, especially when attacking someone with greater knowledge.
No it doesn't, idiots like him (and you) will continue to be idiots, and think that they're right, despite being completely and totally wrong.
The comment isn't for him, it's for others who may see his post.
It is fundamentally impossible to transmit information faster than the speed of light. Using extra dimensions doesn't help. If you want to compress space you'll have to do so at a rate faster than the speed of light across a path that is longer than the initial distance and that traverses the initial di
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"Wow you're dumb."
Says the kid that cant think. GO back to Geometry 101 kid.
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Why not just imagine instant, and free, teleportation? Both violate the lawsof physics as we know them.
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The current MODEL of quantum mechanics, with some as of now unprovable assumptions baked in to make the maths easier, says this is impossible. That being said, nobody's come up with a model saying it is possible either.
In any case, the point is moot unless we figure out how to manipulate an atom on command to emit an electron with a specific spin. Then and ONLY then would QEC be even theoretically possible.
Re:Call me when we have instant transfer of data (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong. Quantum entanglement does not allow any information to be transferred faster than light.
Sitting a million miles away from your partner with your entangled particle, the only thing you know is that you and your distant partner will measure a correlated result from that particle -- a fact you already knew a million years ago when you parted company in your very-nearly-light-speed ship.
You do not know, and can not control, what the value will be. You do not know if the other person has measured their particle's state or not. Measuring the state destroys the entanglement. All you know after is that the result you got will be correlated with what they get, or got.
No information transfer is possible.
However entanglement is useful for other things. Like networks where you can detect if someone snooped on your packets.
Re:Call me when we have instant transfer of data (Score:4, Informative)
You forget that quantum shit be weird. If you think of particles as particles and their state as a 0/1 variable, then that's totally true. But particles do crazy things. One of the things they do is act like waves if nobody is looking. Entangled particles have to behave like the same sort of thing. In particular, if one of them enters a two slit setup and self interferes, the entangled pair has to also act like a wave and self interfere. This apparently occurs regardless of distance. What this means is that if Alice and Bob have a shared set of atoms. If Alice shoots an atom at a pair of slits, then Bob's atom will self interfere even if shot at an unshielded detector. Now that's not useful for sending messages, because statistically Bob can't tell if it hit where it hit because it's a particle, or because it's a wave. And the quantum equations say the same thing, that statistically the two states cannot be distinguished from random noise. However, the equations do not apply to larger systems, and we don't currently have ones that do.
Now, people assume there must be some quantum effect to prevent this from being used, because superluminal signals are mutually exclusive with causality, and most people assume causality holds. But there's no strong evidence either way at the moment.
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I haven't ever read that a two slit type situation is applicable to an entangled particle pair. Entangled particles will exhibit interference patterns because all particle are also waves, I don't know that it's a function of them being entangled.
Also, if one particle was subject to a two-slit scenario, then the other could not possibly react with an interference situation in absence of its own pair of slits - what if both particles were going through two different pairs of slits at the same time, they would
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What is the limit of entanglement? Could the whole universe be entangled already?
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How is this any different than, say, Morse code?
In Morse Code you can control what state the wire is in without destroying it before a single bit is sent. In Morse Code you can measure the output of the wire without similarly destroying it.
Observing spin does not destroy entanglement.
No. Measuring spin causes the particle to take on a definite state, breaking the entanglement, as surely as measuring it's momentum.
Even if it didn't, though, you still couldn't communicate. You'd just know that a longer sequence of spin data you saw would be correlated with the other end. Interacting with the part
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I'm constantly measuring my particle. Spin up is zero. Spin down is one. How is this any different than, say, Morse code? Observing spin does not destroy entanglement. Quantum entanglement appears to propagate at thousands of times the speed of light.
For two reasons:
First, you're constantly measuring those values, but you can't force the particle to assume one of those values. So both you and the other person are reading random values. The same random values, yes, but random values nonetheless.
Second, reading the spin collapses it a (again, random) value. You might not destroy entanglement, but before you can "use" it again, both particles must be placed into a superposition state once more. Then you read it again. When you're doing the whole measu
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You have a 'handshake' that each of you sends via your respective 'sending' particles.
Sending anything at all is the problem. You can't.
Measuring or modifying your particle breaks the entanglement with the other. You can't control what the other person will see, you can't tell if they've checked. How then do you send your handshake?
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This whole conversation is based on a misunderstanding of entanglement.
Entanglement is where two (or more, but let's keep it at two) particles are created in such a way that a conservation law must be maintained - say for example a particle of spin 0 decays and emits two electrons, then these 2 electrons must have spin -1/2 and spin +1/2 (or something like that, I can't remember how conservation of angular momentum works in quantum physics, but the principle is there).
Anyway, you have two particles, whose
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I think the bigger question then becomes, why does your very-nearly-light-speed ship take a year to travel a single mile?
It doesn't. The pit stops to refuel are really long though.
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This comment is wrong. Imagine that the sender and receiver were sufficiently far apart, say a million light years. Quantum entanglement would allow them to have faster than light communication even if it was being "encrypted" and "decrypted" with a commodore 64.
No, it does not. Another poster already linked to the No-Communication theorem [wikipedia.org]. Basically, the effects of quantum entanglement are transmitted faster-than-light, instantaneously, in fact. Information through this process cannot be transferred faster than light.
It boils down to this: if you're light-years apart from me, and we each have one particle that is entangled with the other, if I collapse the state of my particle, I know which state your particle has collapsed to simultaneously. However, I canno
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Mod up. If this is correct, it's probably the most lucid explanation I have seen. Statements that "the theorem says so" amount to a faith argument, which doesn't convince me. But I'm no expert.
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Mod up. If this is correct, it's probably the most lucid explanation I have seen. Statements that "the theorem says so" amount to a faith argument, which doesn't convince me. But I'm no expert.
It's not correct. Bell's theorem proved that the Hidden variable theory [wikipedia.org] isn't true. The particle really does not have the state until you measure it.
That said, you still can't transfer information that way, because you can't force the particle to assume the state you want. If the particle can achieve state x or y, and you read x, you can be sure the other particle is in state y. However, you don't know if you're going to read x or y until you read it, so the only thing you can tell is that both you and
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"Why would it be impossible to entagle more than two particles and send two of them to a receiver and destroy the entaglement from the third at a time previusly decided upon to transfer information"
I don't think you've understood what entanglement means. I just means that a set number if particle have been created, and one of their properties (spin, mass, charge, etc.) must together add up to some know amount.
I.e. a charge +1 proton decays and spews out some particles, and these particle must add up to havi
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We'd connect with ourselves, when we eventually leave the planet. Leaving the planet for permanent colonies is something I don't expect to see while I am alive, but it should be possible. Hell, it's probably possible now, but everyone seems to have higher priorities and there is no pressing need at the moment.
Still, I wouldn't argue with an even better communication method. In the end, better communications is a pillar of modern society as it allows more people to collaborate on much more complex project
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There's no proof that there is anything out there, but there's no proof their isn't either, and there's a lot of space for something else to develop. The idea that sentient life only developed on Earth in such a large universe requires belief in a spectacularly low-power god, IMO.
Of course, we'd have to transfer entangled nodes to these other civilizations, or have them transferred to us, which may not be feasible, ever, especially if sentience happens once or twice (or less) per galaxy.
However, if we manag
Quantum Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
I am no physicist, so I am actually asking seriously to those of you who are.
As it is already know, particles which are entangled at the quantum level have an instant and equal reaction on one another regardless of distance. Would it not be possible to use this "Quantum Internet" for C from say, a satellite controller a rover on Mars and one on Earth?
I have heard that it is not really workable, but is that from an engineering prospective or from a laws of physics perspective?
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Suppose you have a rover on Mars and a rover on Earth, and the question is whether they should go North or South. With quantum entanglement, you can say "go the same way!" and both rovers will instantly go the same way, or you can say "go different ways!" and both rovers will instantly go different ways. But when you do this you can't control which way a particular rover is going, which will be random. You only control the "xor" of the two directions.
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The problem with using this for FTL is what is known as the no-communication theorem. The quantum state of two entangled particles will change faster than light (instantly, actually), but you will never be able to control what state that the particle switches to when you make the change because of the way quantum mechanics works.
For instance, I separate two entangled particles and then proceed to start altering the state of one of them. I know I can change the state, but I do not know what the value of th
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However, since I was unable to predict what state the particle will be in when it is changed, the other side cannot tell if the change was due to transmission or just some random event. Thus, your message arrives faster than light, but no one can read it, or even realize that there even was a message sent to begin with.
If the state changes are truly random, you can work by detecting non-random anomalies in state, and build an information transmission scheme around it.
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... particles which are entangled at the quantum level have an instant and equal reaction on one another regardless of distance. Would it not be possible to use this "Quantum Internet" for C from say, a satellite controller a rover on Mars and one on Earth? ...
It would be cool, but a quick search shows that the answer is apparently No. It seems two entangled atoms are like two coins that mirror each other such that if one is tossed, the next time the other is tossed it will show the same value. It's weird, but it can't be used for communication, something that also prevents causality from being violated.
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Entanglement allows you to instantaneously share a bit of information, but doesn't let you control what the bit will be. This makes it useless for most communication tasks.
That being said, entanglement can allow coordination in a way that is similar to communication. Check out the Wikipedia article on "quantum pseudo telepathy".
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Right, but you are not actually sending data. When they are entangled, you separate them. When you change the state of one, it changes the state of another. Why could you not just view the state as a way of transferring information?
Re:Quantum Internet (Score:5, Informative)
When you change the state of one, it changes the state of another. Why could you not just view the state as a way of transferring information?
Because you can't control the state that it collapses to when you measure it and break the entanglement. You can't tell whether or not the person on the other end has already done this. All you know is that whatever state you measure, they will see a correlated result. Which you already knew; you've learned nothing.
A useful analogy* -- it's like you and the person you want to "communicate" with put two marbles, one red and one black, into two bags. You randomly pick one, your partner takes the other. You fly apart at 0.9c for a while. Then you look in your bag. It's a red marble. You now "instantly" know that your partner has a black marble -- but you haven't actually communicated anything.
* It's just an analogy; the fact that it doesn't obey Bell's theorem is immaterial to understanding why you haven't communicated anything.
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Speaking as someone who actually knows a bit about the science; this really is a very good analogy.
Thanks! I added the disclaimer because I've had people complain that because the outcome of the marble-bag experiment doesn't precisely match the statistical behavior of quantum particles it is a bad analogy. But... that's not what the analogy is about. :)
it's more preventing the marbles from falling into random buckets of paint (ie: getting their state changed by various environmental factors), and providing less then no information.
Isn't this part of the appeal of the quantum network -- if environmental factors like a dude sniffing your packets broke the entanglement, you could detect it? I guess if you can't prevent the environment from breaking entanglement all the time then th
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But if I didn't fuck up, how would I be able to keep striving to improve?
Yeah... I'm not buying it either...
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(which is still actually impossible, under current theories)
This may seem like a trivial, idle remark, but I sincerely appreciate the effort you made in saying "impossible, under current theories." There are too many peoplewho fall into either the linguistic or mental trap of treating current theory as the ground truth state of the universe.
C//
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So is there anything you could actually accomplish with this "network"? I assume you are correct, which would then make the article complete hogwash.
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So is there anything you could actually accomplish with this "network"?
Yes! Because measuring the state of the particles breaks the entanglement, in a quantum network you would theoretically be able to tell if someone was listening in -- you'd send the correlation information along with the regular data, and if it didn't line up with what you saw in your particles at your end, then you'd know that the entanglement had been broken and someone had sniffed your packets.
The application would be key exchange. You could just send a shared key over the insecure network, and if nobo
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Both sides have a bag of say 10,000 serialized, entangled particles and the guy holding the bag in DC asks, "Have they launched anything yet?" "No."
But how are you determining that the answer to the question is "no"? You don't know if they've measured their particles or not. You only know that when you measure yours, you'll see a result that's correlated with what they see.
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A: if two particles are entangled and to one of them a state is written, does the state of the other 'end' change? My understanding of the discussion so far says yes, but I want to be clear here.
No. "Writing" a new state to one of the two particles breaks the entanglement. The other particle's observed state will no longer be correlated with the one you wrote to.
Heisenberg Disagrees? (Score:2)
99.8% data loss (Score:3)
From TFA, this is apparently a huge improvement on previous attempts, but it's still not exactly dazzling. What sort of self-correcting protocol do you need to handle 499 of every 500 bits being lost?
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Sending 500 times the exact same information would fix your specific problem... =)
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I guess we won't discuss the state-of-the-art in neutrino communication, then...
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27648/ [technologyreview.com]
These guys used an experiment called NuMI (NeUtrino beam at the Main Injector) to generate an intense beam of neutrinos. The beam consisted of about 25 pulses each separated by 2 seconds or so, with each pulse containing some 10^13 neutrinos.
The beam is pointed at a detector called MINERvA weighing about 170 tonnes and sitting in an underground cavern about a kilometre away. To reach MINERvA, the beam has to travel through 240 metres of solid rock.
MINERvA is one of world's most sensitive neutrino detectors and yet, out of 10^13 neutrinos in each pulse, it detects only about 0.8 of them on average.
Nevertheless, that's enough to send a message. The FermiLab team used a simple on-off protocol to represent the 0s and 1s of digital code and transmitted the word "neutrino".
The entire message took about 140 minutes to send at a data rate that these guys later worked out to be about 0.1 bits per second with an error rate of less than 1 per cent.
-l
"carries the quantum state"? (Score:4, Informative)
So information might be passed around, but it's never actually being shared.
Which isn't much of a network.
Disclaimer - I'm rusty.
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I don't think so. Assuming that's all possible, how does that help the sender to send meaningful information? All he knows is that he just sent a 1 or a 0. He doesn't know what the next bit will be. It's still no better than having two magically-FTL-interlinked RNGs.
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As a computer programmer, this concept of not being able to transmit something with entanglement has always seemed like a fallacy to me. In my mind there has to be a way to pull it off. Unfortunately, a lot of physicists aren't programmers so they're just looking at the raw data and saying it can't be done, but they're not thinking like a software engineer and saying how can we at least get this to halfway work.
Yeah, and similarly if only they'd let software engineers loose on solving the problem of faster than light travel, instead of listening to all those boring scientists with their negative "you cannot exceed the speed of light" attitude.
Because anything can be solved by a clever enough computer programmer.
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Since when does "network" imply "sharing"?
Since computers?
Note that despite the fact that classical information can be duplicated at will,
Noisily, expensively, and most importantly, uniquely; that is to say, when you copy a physical document, the new copy is, in fact, a completely different and separate thing than every other copy, that just happens to contain patterns that can be interpreted as information.
On a computer network, that interprable pattern, all by itself, can be copied, transmitted, and manipulated, without ever permanently committing any given copy of that pattern to any particular physical object. The most im
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The difference from the water network (lack of copy) is an interesting point. There's no fan-out - no two people can have the same bit at the same time. And if you get fan-out via mixing, you get dilution. I certainly don't want C20 solutions of homeopathic internet.
Scaling Up (Score:1)
One bit.
How many bits (not bytes, bits) make up an "internet"?
+1 internets to anybody who can give a reasonable answer.
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How many bits (not bytes, bits) make up an "internet"?
Why, eight times the number of bytes of course. Did I win teh internets?
Installer's dream (Score:1)
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That's nothing. I used to have a Quantum hard drive.
IP Traffic into the future (Score:2)
quantum what??? (Score:2)
I'm looking forward (Score:2)
to read the quantum version of Slashdot.
Ansible? (Score:1)
I'm In the Wrong Field (Score:2)
Ritter acknowledges that the new work is simply a prototype, and one for which numerous improvements are possible. For instance, the transfer of a quantum state between labs succeeded only 0.2 percent of the time, owing to various inefficiencies and technical limitations. "Everything is at the edge of what can be done," he says. "All these characteristics are good enough to do what we've done, but there are clear strategies to pursue to make them even better."
I wish I could publish a 0.2 % yield, or an experiment that worked 0.2 % of the time in Nature! Clearly I'm in the wrong field (but in all serious, getting atoms to communicate through a fiber optic cable is pretty freaking cool.)
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Hey as long as it can be made to work reliably it's still a link, not unlike a range-limit wifi connection with a ton of dropped packets.
FTL info transfer. (Score:1)
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Then send a message by just collapsing the corresponding bits.
The bits don't collapse until they're measured, which destroys the entanglement. You can't watch the bits to see if they collapse on their own, because you can't observe them at all without destructively measuring them. All you know for sure is that when someone else measures their entangled bits, they'll get the same pattern you did when you measured yours.
You can use it to send a message and know that the first person to read it will be the only person that will be able to read it.
Perhaps I missed this qbit ... (Score:1)
Maybe the explanation is in TFA and it went over my head but are the two atoms actually quantum entangled? The process seemed to me more like ordinary synchronization. One photon carrying information (at exactly the speed of light, natch) from one of the atoms to the other, somehow making the quantum value of the recipient the same as the value of the sender at the time it was sent. Isn't "entanglement" more that a copy-and-assign?
Not that maintaining the total information in a qbit over a link could not b
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So when does the iPhone Qubit come out?
As soon as Apple can patent the idea "for use on a handheld communications device", and it will be called the qBit. Actually, iQ is a much more catchy name.
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Archos is going to come out with one that has a 3 dimensional qbit array.
It will be 300 qbits long, 50 qbits wide, and 30qbits tall
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I know a few Apple fans who have an iQ 4.
Re:iPhone qubit? (Score:5, Funny)