The race to bring quantum teleportation to your world There'd an international quantum teleportation space race heating up October

5, 2012 Around the world, countries are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication, Wired Science r eports. In the past year, a team from China and another in Austria set new records for q uantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open air over 60 and 89 miles, respectively. If developed, quantum teleportation satellites could allow spies to pass large a mounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers which would be smaller and exponentially more powerful than modern computers, able to model complex phenomenon, rapidly c runch numbers, and render modern encryption keys useless they would need quantum teleporters in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the Inter net. China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payloa d in 2016 and the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years. How It works The trick to teleportation comes from a quirk of quantum mechanics that allows y ou to create two particles that are completely in tune with one another, which a re known as an entangled pair. To send a controllable signal, you need quantum teleportation. This requires thr ee subatomic particles, say photons. Two of the photons are entangled with one a nother, and the third contains the bit of information you want to send. Now we want to show that this kind of communication might be useful on a global s cale, said physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, who led the Aus trian quantum-distance team. The method of choice is to use quantum communication via satellite, he added, since photons can t travel very far in glass fiber withou t getting absorbed. The Race to Space Being able to do this quantum satellite teleportation would provide many new adv antages, in particular the ability to create cryptographic keys for sensitive in formation that would be stored in subatomic particles. If anyone were to measure the particle, they would change its properties so spy agencies would always kno w if they ve been hacked. Someday in the future, James Bond and MI6 could be passi ng secret codes back and forth on a teleported light beam through space. With this in mind, there are now a couple of research groups considering how to b uild a quantum payload suitable for a satellite, said physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. There s basically a race going on to get into space first with a quantum satellite. The Chinese space agency has put $554 million toward funding five scientific sat

ellites over the coming years, one of which will be used for quantum communicati on. This is a new direction for China, which has in the past launched more than 100 satellites, but until now only one for dedicated scientific experiments. While t he exact figure for the quantum communication project is unknown, it could be on the order of $50 to 100 million, estimated Zeilinger. This stands in contrast t o Europe and Canada, which have invested an order of magnitude less for their pr ojects. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-race-to-bring-quantum-teleportation-to-your-world