First Earth to Orbit Quantum Teleportation Completed

Researchers in China have teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite

Researchers in China just teleported the first object ever from the ground to a satellite orbiting more than 500 km above.

A year ago, a Long March 2D rocket was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert containing a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher.

MIT Technology Review describes Micius as a “highly sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground”.

That’s important because it should allow scientists to test the technological building blocks for various quantum feats such as entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation.

Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world.

The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement: this occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence.

Back in the 1990s, scientists realized they could use this link to transmit quantum information from one point in the universe to another.

The idea is to “download” all the information associated with one photon in one place and transmit it over an entangled link to another photon in another place.

This second photon then takes on the identity of the first. To all intents and purposes, it becomes the first photon.

That’s the nature of teleportation and it has been performed many times in labs on Earth.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1707.00934: Ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation.