Saturday, June 16, 2012

Another Quantum Computing Leap

In the recent Science News Magazine, Alexandra Witze reports that long-distance quantum teleportation has succeeded,
In teleportation, two people — physicists call them Alice and Bob — share one each of a pair of entangled particles. Alice measures a property on her particle and sends Bob a note, through regular channels, about what she did. Bob then knows how to alter his own particle to match Alice’s. Bob’s particle then possesses the information that had been contained in Alice’s, which was obliterated by her measurement. Thus the information has been “teleported” from Alice’s lab to Bob’s.
Physicists first teleported quantum information in 1997 using a single pair of entangled photons, or particles of light. Since then researchers have slowly upped the ante, teleporting with larger groups of photons, over longer distances and sometimes using atoms as the entangled particles.

The phenomena of quantum teleportation may help quantum computers function as well as digital computing when doing calculations. Another article describes how this process works,
...researchers manipulated data for the gate using two input qubits, one with the state that would ultimately be read, and the other to be flipped. They also had four more qubits all entangled with one another in a special state that they would use to read and output the results of the gate.
To do the gate operation, they took each of the input qubits and paired it with one of the entangled qubits.... Each pair was then read, or measured... resolving them to some combination of 1 and 0. This process teleported the data of the two input qubits onto the set of four entangled ones.
Because two of the qubits being measured were entangled with the output qubits, the output qubits were resolved too.

Such experiments harken a time when computing power will exceed current trends by, well, a quantum leap.
- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Location:Silver Spring

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