Monday, January 17, 2011

New Type Of Entanglement Allows 'Teleportation in Time,' Say Physicists - Technology Review

New Type Of Entanglement Allows 'Teleportation in Time,' Say Physicists - Technology Review: To see how, imagine an experiment that Ralph and Olson describe in which a qubit is sent into the future. The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit.

But there's a twist. Olson and Ralph show that the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement," they say. For that reason, they call this process "teleportation in time".

But how is this different from ordinary existence? After all, we're all time travellers, moving into the future at the same rate. What's special about Olson and Ralph's route?

The answer is that Olson and Ralph's teleportation provides a shortcut into the future. What they're saying is that it's possible to travel into the future without being present during the time in between.

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