Introduction:

Ever since the wheel was invented more than 5,000 years
ago, people have been inventing new ways to travel faster
from one point to another. The chariot, bicycle, automobile,
airplane and rocket have all been invented to decrease the
amount of time we spend getting to our desired destinations.
Yet each of these forms of transportation share the same flaw:
They require us to cross a physical distance, which can take
anywhere from minutes to many hours depending on the
starting and ending points.

But what if there were a way to get you from your home
to the supermarket without having to use your car or from your
backyard to the International Space Station without having to
board a spacecraft? There are scientists working right now on
such a method of travel, combining properties of
telecommunications and transportation to achieve a system
called teleportation. In this report, we will learn about
experiments that have actually achieved teleportation with
photons, and how we might be able to use teleportation to
travel anywhere, at anytime.

What is Teleportation?
Teleportation involves dematerializing an object at one
point, and sending the details of that object's precise atomic
configuration to another location, where it will be
reconstructed. What this means is that time and space could
be eliminated from travel -- we could be transported to any
location instantly, without actually crossing a physical
distance.

Most of us were introduced to the idea of teleportation,

and other futuristic technologies, by the short-lived Star Trek
television series (1966-69) based on tales written by Gene
Roddenberry. Viewers watched in amazement as Captain Kirk,
Spock, Dr. McCoy and others beamed down to the planets they
encountered on their journeys through the universe.

In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm

of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It
was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of
researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation
was possible, but only if the original object being teleported
was destroyed. This revelation, first announced by Bennett at
an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March
1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29,
1993 issue of Physical Review Letters. Since that time,
experiments using photons have proven that quantum
teleportation is in fact possible.

Photon Experiments:
In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, turned
the IBM ideas into reality by successfully teleporting a photon,
a particle of energy that carries light. The Caltech group was
able to read the atomic structure of a photon, send this
information across 1 meter (3.28 feet) of coaxial cable and
create a replica of the photon. As predicted, the original
photon no longer existed once the replica was made.

In performing the experiment, the Caltech group was

able to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,
the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a
photon. This principle states that you cannot simultaneously
know the location and the speed of a particle. But if you can't
know the position of a particle, then how can you teleport it? In
order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg
Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as
entanglement.
ENTANGLEMENT:
Entanglement means to acquire the properties of one
photon by another photon. In entanglement, at least three
photons are needed to achieve quantum teleportation:

• Photon A: The photon to be teleported

• Photon B: The transporting photon
• Photon C: The photon that is entangled with photon B

If researchers tried to look too closely at photon A

without entanglement, they would bump it, and thereby
change it. By entangling photons B and C, researchers can
extract some information about photon A, and the remaining
information would be passed on to B by way of entanglement,
and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the
information from photon A to photon C, they can create an
exact replica of photon A. However, photon a no longer exists
as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

PRINCIPLE OF ENTANGLEMENT:

Fig:1
 Two photons ‘E1’ & ‘K’ and beam splitters (it splits a light
into two equal parts) are required.
We direct one of the entangled photons, say ‘E1’, to the
beam splitter.
Meanwhile, we prepare another photon with a polarization of
450, and direct it to the same beam splitter from the other
side, as shown. •This is the photon whose properties will be
transported; we label it ‘K’. We time it so that both ‘E1’ and ‘K’
reach the beam splitter at the same time.

Fig:2

Fig:3

The ‘E1’ photon incident from above ill be reflected by

the beam splitter some of the time and will be transmitted
some of the time. Similarly for the ‘K’ photon that is incident
from below. So sometimes both photons will end up going up
and to the right as shown.
Similarly, sometimes both photons will end up going
down and to the right.

But sometimes one photon will end up going upwards and

the other will be going downwards, as shown. This will occur
when either both photons have been reflected or both photons
have been transmitted.

Thus there are three possible arrangements for the

photons from the beam splitter: both upwards, both
downwards, or one upwards and one downwards.

Which of these three possibilities has occurred can be

determined if we put detectors in the paths of the photons
after they have left the beam splitter.

However, in the case of one photon going upwards and

the other going downwards, we cannot tell which is which.
Perhaps both photons were reflected by the beam splitter, but
perhaps both were transmitted.

This means that the two photons have become entangled.

Also somewhat surprisingly, for a single pair of photons

incident on the beam splitter, the photon ‘E1’ has now
collapsed into a state where its polarization is -450, the
opposite polarization of the prepared 450 one. This is because
the photons have become entangled. So although we don't
know which photon is which, we know the polarizations of both
of them.

The explanation of these two somewhat surprising results is

beyond the level of this discussion, but can be explained by
the phase shifts the light experiences when reflected, the
mixture of polarization states of ‘E1’, and the consequent
interference between the two photons.

A more recent teleportation success was achieved at the

Australian National University, when researchers successfully
teleported a laser beam.

While the idea of creating replicas of objects and

destroying the originals doesn't sound too inviting for humans,
quantum teleportation does hold promise for quantum
computing. These experiments with photons are important in
developing networks that can distribute quantum information.
Professor Samuel Braunstein, of the University of Wales,
Bangor, called such a network a "quantum Internet." This
technology may be used one day to build a quantum computer
that has data transmission rates many times faster than
today's most powerful computers.

Human Teleportation:
We are years away from the development of a
teleportation machine like the transporter room on Star Trek's
Enterprise spaceship. The laws of physics may even make it
impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be
sent instantaneously to another location, which would require
travel at the speed of light.

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to

be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 1028 atoms that
make up the human body. That's a more than a trillion trillion
atoms. This machine would then have to send this information
to another location, where the person's body would be
reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn't be even
a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some
severe neurological or physiological defect.

In the Star Trek episodes, and the spin-off series that

followed it, teleportation was performed by a machine called a
transporter. This was basically a platform that the characters
stood on, while Scotty adjusted switches on the transporter
room control boards. The transporter machine then locked
onto each atom of each person on the platform, and used a
transporter carrier wave to transmit those molecules to
wherever the crew wanted to go. Viewers watching at home
witnessed Captain Kirk and his crew dissolving into a shiny
glitter before disappearing, rematerializing instantly on some
distant planet.

If such a machine were possible, it's unlikely that the

person being transported would actually be "transported." It
would work more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the
person would be made at the receiving end, but with much
greater precision than a fax machine. But what would happen
to the original? One theory suggests that teleportation would
combine genetic cloning with digitization.
 In this biodigital cloning, tele-travelers would have to
die, in a sense. Their original mind and body would no longer
exist. Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated in
another location, and digitization would recreate the travelers'
memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. So the travelers
would still exist, but they would do so in a new body, of the
same atomic structure as the original body, programmed with
the same information.

Quantum Teleportation:
Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers
to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one
place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How
this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the
general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in
such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this
information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to
construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material
of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds,
arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A
teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that
it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents,
it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate
facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of
scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters
that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when
the original and teleported versions of the same person meet;
but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original,
functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect
replicator of souls and bodies.
In 1993 an
international
group of six
scientists,
including IBM
Fellow Charles H.
Bennett,
confirmed the
intuitions of the
majority of
science fiction
writers by
showing that
perfect
teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the
original is destroyed. Meanwhile, other scientists are planning
experiments to demonstrate teleportation in microscopic
objects, such as single atoms or photons, in the next few
years. But science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that
no one expects to be able to teleport people or other
macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of
engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any
fundamental law to do so. Until recently, teleportation was not
taken seriously by scientists, because it was thought to violate
the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids
any measuring or scanning process from extracting all the
information in an atom or other object. According to the
uncertainty principle, the more accurately an object is
scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until
one reaches a point where the object's original state has been
completely disrupted, still without having extracted enough
information to make a perfect replica. This sounds like a solid
argument against teleportation: if one cannot extract enough
information from an object to make a perfect copy, it would
seem that a perfect copy cannot be made. But the six
scientists found a way to make an end-run around this logic,
using a celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum
mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. In
brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from
an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the
remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has
never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a
treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is
possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in
before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having
been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been
achieved is teleportation, not replication.
 As the figure above suggests, the unscanned part of the
information is conveyed from A to C by an intermediary object
B, which interacts first with C and then with A. What? Can it
really be correct to say "first with C and then with A"? Surely,
in order to convey something from A to C, the delivery vehicle
must visit A before C, not the other way around. But there is a
subtle, unscannable kind of information that, unlike any
material cargo, and even unlike ordinary information, can
indeed be delivered in such a backward fashion. This subtle
kind of information, also called "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR)
correlation" or "entanglement", has been at least partly
understood since the 1930s when it was discussed in a famous
paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. In
the 1960s John Bell showed that a pair of entangled particles,
which were once in contact but later move too far apart to
interact directly, can exhibit individually random behavior that
is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics.
Experiments on photons and other particles have repeatedly
confirmed these correlations, thereby providing strong
evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics, which neatly
explains them. Another well-known fact about EPR correlations
is that they cannot by themselves deliver a meaningful and
controllable message. It was thought that their only usefulness
was in proving the validity of quantum mechanics. But now it is
known that, through the phenomenon of quantum
teleportation, they can deliver exactly that part of the
information in an object which is too delicate to be scanned out

and delivered by conventional methods.

 This figure compares conventional facsimile transmission
with quantum teleportation (seen previously). In conventional
facsimile transmission the original is scanned, extracting
partial information about it, but remains more or less intact
after the scanning process. The scanned information is sent to
the receiving station, where it is imprinted on some raw
material (egg paper) to produce an approximate copy of the
original. In quantum teleportation two objects B and C are first
brought into contact and then separated. Object B is taken to
the sending station, while object C is taken to the receiving
station. At the sending station object B is scanned together
with the original object A which one wishes to teleport, yielding
some information and totally disrupting the state of A and B.
The scanned information is sent to the receiving station, where
it is used to select one of several treatments to be applied to
object C, thereby putting C into an exact replica of the former
state of A.

Practical Applications:
Practical applications for teleportation, though not
exactly the type seen in Star Trek, could be less than a
generation away.

According to a report released Thursday by Technical

Insights, the first applications of teleportation will be in
quantum computers and quantum cryptography, not
human transport.

Physicists can already teleport tiny things, such as a

beam of light or the angular spin of atomic nuclei. But
physicists caution that teleportation research is still in the
early development stage.

"Right now we are just making demos of quantum

teleportation, which is different than the teleportation you see
in Star Trek," said Raymond Laflamme, a staff scientist at Los
Alamos National Laboratory.

But within 20 years, Laflamme said teleportation could be

a fundamental step in the creation of quantum computers,
cryptography, and an emerging technology called
"superdense coding," in which two quantum bits could be
transmitted for the price one.

"We're finally at the stage where people can hazard to

guess a timeline for when these sci-fi types of things can be
seen in real life," said Alex Tullo, author of the Technical
Insights report.

The mysterious aspect of quantum teleportation lies

in the fact that information can move from location A to
location B without moving in the space between A and B. Until
recently, it was deemed impossible by scientists who thought it
contradicted the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Now teleportation technologies are being applied to

quantum cryptography, a communications procedure so secure
that any attempt at interception of an encrypted code by an
eavesdropper would result in message’s immediate
destruction.

Such impenetrable communications systems could have

vast implications for the future of national security and
international intelligence, Laflamme said. "With quantum
cryptography, we can be sure that encrypted
information is 100 percent secure."

There already is a prototype of a quantum computer at

Los Alamos. It's capable of sending information up to a
distance of 48 kilometers.

"It's amazing," said Laflamme. "Only five years ago

people thought this was a crazy idea. Now we're bringing down
information onto single atoms and manipulating it."

It's good news for cryptography and secure computing.

But, unfortunately for Star Trek fans, few scientists see a
future in beam-style transport.
Conclusion: -

But like all technologies, scientists are sure to continue to

improve upon the ideas of teleportation, to the point that we
may one day be able to avoid such harsh methods. One day,
one of your descendents could finish up a work day at a space
office above some far away planet in a galaxy many light years
from Earth, tell his or her wristwatch that it's time to beam
home for dinner on planet X below and sit down at the dinner
table as soon as the words leave his mouth.

References:-

1. Information technology(Teleportation)
2. http://www.howstuffwork.com
3. http://www.wired.com
4. http://www.ibm.com