13 - Quantum teleportation

Summary

Transmission of a polarization state

The word “teleportation” comes from parapsychology and means transportation of persons or things from one place to another using mental power. It was taken over into science fiction literature, where the transport is imagined to take place instantaneously. However this is still to be invented, and is surely nonsense – relativity theory teaches us that the velocity of light is the upper bound for the motion of an object. Nevertheless, teleportation has occupied a firm place in our fantasies, and when renowned quantum physicists (as has happened) use this word, they can be sure to attract attention. So, what is it all about? The basic idea is that it is not necessary to transport material constituents (ultimately the elementary particles). The same particles already exist at other places; we “simply” need to put them together in the right way. To do this, we need a complete set of building instructions, and this is, according to quantum theory, the quantum mechanical wave function representing the maximum information known about an object. We could imagine the wave function measured on the original system, then transmitted via a conventional (classical) information channel to another place and there used for system reconstruction. Unfortunately, the first step, the determination of the wave function on a single system, is impossible (see Section 10.3). However, quantum mechanics offers us another “magic trick.”