THE RACE IS ON FOR QUANTUM TELEPORTING DISTANCE RECORDS

About two weeks ago I reported on the Chinese having broken the qubit teleportation distance record. Well, the race is on in this alchemical information-transfer technology, for now Phys.org is reporting that the Europeans have already beat the recent Chinese acheivement:

European team bests Chinese record at teleporting distance

As I reported in the original Chinese story, it is even more true here: there are features of this recent achievement that will have them burning the midnight oil in the black projects agencies of various nations. This one is even better, and one need go no further than the opening paragraph of the report to see why:

"(Phys.org) -- A European team of physicists has bested the record set by a team of Chinese researchers last month for distance in teleporting quantum bits (qubits). Where the Chinese team accomplished their feat by teleporting photons across a lake, the European team did so by performing the same feat across the ocean between two islands off the coast of Africa. It was apparently no easy feat as the team describes in the paper they’ve written and uploaded to the preprint server arXiv; they had so much foul weather to contend with that their experiment took nearly a year to complete. The record breaking distance by the Chinese team was close to 100 meters. The Europeans bested that mark by almost fifty meters, setting up a possible rivalry between the two teams to see which might be the first to successfully teleport a qubit to an orbiting satellite." (Emphasis added)

When I first read this paragraph about teleporting to a satellite, I thought to myself "Nah, no way, we're not that close yet..." But then I read on:

"In their paper, the team says that they had to develop several different techniques to deal with all the noise that occurs when attempting to communicate not just through the air, but air that is volatile. This was made even more difficult by uncooperative weather and sand storms. One of those new techniques might just help pave the way to teleporting qubits much longer distances. They used entangled photons to synchronize the clocks that were used on both ends of their system to enable them to look at the qubits at both locations at very nearly the same instant in time. Prior to the development of this method, researchers had to rely on GPS synchronization. This new method reduced the event window from 10 nanoseconds to just 3.

"The team notes that adapting their technique to teleport qubits to a satellite should be easier in some respects, as there is less noise when trying to teleport straight up as opposed to horizontally through the atmosphere."(Emphasis added).

Now, I read that, and nearly choked. Synchronizing clocks in order to teleport, rather than GPS reliance... to permit near-simultaneous observations!

The implications here, for those who know the thought experiments behind Einstein's special relativity and clock syncrhonization, are rather breathtaking, but even more breathtaking are the implications for data encryption and decryption, for one of those implications is that any "interceptor" of a message will have to have a clock synchronization within mere nano-seconds of those sending and receiving the teleported message...and that's got to have the think tanks working over time...

The discovery means nothing less than that the black projects agencies of various governments now have to game out the information security implications of these achievements, and that will have them burning the midnight oil in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Beijing.... well...you get the idea.

See you on the flip side.