An authoritative, entertaining examination of the ultimate thrill ride Until recently the stuff of sci-fi fiction and Star Trek reruns, teleportation has become a reality-for subatomic particles at least. In this eye-opening book, science author David Darling follows the remarkable evolution of teleportation, visiting the key labs that have cradled this cutting-edge science and relating the all-too-human stories behind its birth. He ties in the fast emerging fields of cryptography and quantum computing, tackles some thorny philosophical questions (for instance, can a soul be teleported?)
An authoritative, entertaining examination of the ultimate thrill ride Until recently the stuff of sci-fi fiction and Star Trek reruns, teleportation has become a reality-for subatomic particles at least. In this eye-opening book, science author David Darling follows the remarkable evolution of teleportation, visiting the key labs that have cradled this cutting-edge science and relating the all-too-human stories behind its birth. He ties in the fast emerging fields of cryptography and quantum computing, tackles some thorny philosophical questions (for instance, can a soul be teleported?)
Quantum technology is one of the most promising and challenging fields in contemporary science. Quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and more generally quantum information technologies claim that they, in the short term, will change our paradigm of classical computing and communications. Concepts such as duality, superposition, entanglement, teleportation and many others seem to be closer to magic or science fiction than to everyday human experience. However, herein lies also the unlimited power of human thought, which mathematics and physics help us to go beyond our immediate experience of the world. This book, oriented toward undergraduate students pursuing Bachelor’s Degrees in Engineering, draws on the experience of the authors during nearly ten years of work in this field. The book consists of a comprehensive list of exercises with increasing degrees of dificulty. Additional material such as solved problems and a basic compilation of theory is also included in each chapter. The list of topics, which include among others, quantum computing, quantum teleportation, superdense coding, quantum processors or quantum communication protocols, intended for opening doors that will motivate students to continue delving into the field of quantum technologies, which has only just begun to be explored.
Quantum teleportation is one of the most enigmatic protocols realized so far in the area of quantum information, allowing for the transfer of quantum information assisted by an entangled state. It was a subject of science fiction 20 years ago, but now is a fundamental experimental protocol and quantum primitive for quantum information processing tasks. There have been many successful realizations of teleportation ranging from those using photons, atoms, and hybrid systems and long-range teleportation beyond 100km has already been achieved multiple times. These however typically involve explicitly single particle systems or effective few-particle systems. For larger (visible to the naked eye) objects involving many particles, teleportation is typically more difficult due to the fast decoherence such macroscopic objects suffer. In this case, the entanglement disappears almost as soon as it is created, making it useless for such tasks. More recently, teleportation was accomplished in the continuous variables (CV) framework between two atomic ensembles [1]. As remarkable as these achievements are, teleportation schemes that are known today (qubit/CV) do not allow us to teleport more complex quantum states at the macroscopic level. For example, while it is possible in principle to extend teleportation to multiple qubits, on a macroscopic level this is prohibitively complicated and highly susceptible to decoherence. For atomic ensemble CV based schemes, the teleported states are restricted to small displacements from the completely Sx-polarized state on the Bloch sphere.
This book provides a comprehensive and organized study of quantum technology, focusing on principles, mathematical foundations, and practical realizations of quantum teleportation and other processes in the field of quantum information. It starts with the basic principles of quantum mechanics (wave-particle duality, for instance) superposition and measurement theory all helping as the theoretical backbone of current quantum science. In addition to these basics, we provide a concise introduction and discussion of quantum energy or the quantization of energy levels, energy eigenstates and Planck’s constant, which determines what happens in microscopic systems allowing quantum theory an overlap with data from physical observables. Building on these principles, the book introduces quantum states and quantum entanglement, highlighting their non-classical correlations and their crucial role in facilitating quantum communication protocols. This book also discusses quantum gates and quantum circuits as the units of quantum computation and how quantum information is computed and manipulated by using controlled unitary operations. Also, it discusses the impact of both quantum decoherence and environmental noise which pose significant difficulties to coherent quantum systems and dependable information transmission. It discusses methods of error correction and coherence . This book further expanded to quantum cryptography and secure communications with more importance on protocols like quantum key distribution which make use of quantum principles to provide provable security. Quantum computing architectures and algorithms are also measured and various physical implementations and computational models that strive to produce scalable quantum processors are outlined. Problems and limitations of quantum teleportation are critically examined and these are, reliability issues, channel losses, scaling, and resource limitations. Lastly, the book ends by outlining the future of quantum technology, investigating the new technologies and opportunities, the possible advances, and the revolutionary use of quantum technologies in the fields of computation, communication and secure information processing.
Following on from his bestseller, SCHRODINGER'S CAT, John Gribbin presents the recent dramatic improvements in experimental techniques that have enabled physicists to formulate and test new theories about the nature of light. He describes these theories not in terms of hard-to-imagine entities like spinning subnuclear particles, but in terms of the fate of two small cats, separated at a tender age and carried to opposite ends of the universe. In this way Gribbin introduces the reader to such new developments as quantum cryptography, through which unbreakable codes can be made, and goes on to possible future developments such as the idea that the 'entanglement' of quantum particles could be a way to build a STAR TREK style teleportation machine.
The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science. This book is an original and provocative investigation of that challenge, as well as a novel attempt at writing about science in a style that is simultaneously elementary and deep. It is a lucid and self-contained introduction to the foundations of quantum mechanics, accessible to anyone with a high school mathematics education, and at the same time a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of that subject, some of which are due to the author himself.