Is teleportation possible? It has been achieved with an atom

Por Pablo G. Bejerano

A team of physicists from the University of Queensland (Australia) was able to move an atom using a technique based on quantum mechanics, which could be described as teleportation.

There is a long list of science fiction myths that have become reality over the years.

Teleportation is one of those dreams that have occupied the minds of creators and fans in film and literature.

Dreaming is one thing, but the scientific experiments that are being conducted today are something radically different.

Nevertheless, there is no other name for what Australian researchers have done with an atom.

The work was carried out at the University of Queensland in the Australian city of Brisbane and their results have been reported in the journal Nature, which presents a detailed explanation of the experiment and its bases.

The technique has attracted so much attention that even the researchers have been unable to resist the comparisons.

“In this process the information simply appears at the destination, almost like the teleportation used in the popular science fiction series Star Trek”, says Dr. Arkady Fedorov, one of the team leaders.

But what actually happens?

The fact is that the researchers have managed to send an atom from one place to another within a chip without using a physical means of transport. Scientists call the information that has changed place ‘quantum information’.

According to Dr. Fedorov, the process is made possible by the laws of quantum mechanics.

To do this one must first obtain –-and this is the key issue of the research– a kind of link or correlation called entanglement in English, shared by the information’s origin and its destination.

According to quantum mechanics, this correlation is what makes possible a phenomenon hitherto considered impossible.

One of the aspects stressed by researchers is that quantum teleportation has been used in a circuit, just as today’s modern computers contain a circuit through which information travels.

They claim that this technique allows us to move data with a speed and accuracy far beyond what has been achieved before.

Real-world applications of quantum teleportation
The research results could be used in larger networks and electronic chips with higher performance.

In the future data transmission speeds will serve to improve devices.

Quantum teleportation could also be useful for secure communications and more efficient data processing.

Research into quantum systems can be applied in many different scientific disciplines, from physics and engineering to biology or medicine.

This work opens the door to a different kind of communication than we have known until now, and its usefulness extends to a multitude of areas in which the connection speed between two points is critical.

blogthinkbig.com

Confirman la existencia del ununpentio, el elemento 115 de la tabla periódica

Un modelo de la configuración electrónica del elemento ununpentio

Científicos de la universidad sueca de Lund presentan esta semana en The Physical Review Letters nuevas pruebas que confirman la existencia de un elemento químico desconocido: el que posee el número atómico 115.

El nuevo elemento pertenece al grupo de los superpesados y todavía no ha sido ‘bautizado’ oficialmente, aunque su nombre temporal es ununpentio (Uup).

El experimento que ha llevado a su análisis se ha desarrollado en el centro de investigación GSI (Alemania). 

“Ha sido un experimento muy exitoso y uno de los más importantes en este campo en los últimos años”, destaca Dirk Rudolph, profesor de la división de Física Atómica en la Universidad de Lund.

Los resultados confirman mediciones anteriores efectuadas por grupos de investigación en Rusia, en concreto en el Instituto Conjunto para la Investigación Nuclear en Dubna.

Ahora, los investigadores han bombardeado una fina capa de americio con iones de calcio, de forma que han podido medir los fotones en relación con la desintegración alfa del nuevo elemento. Ciertas energías de los fotones concuerdan con las energías esperadas para la radiación de rayos X, que se considera una ‘huella dactilar’ de cada elemento.

Además de las observaciones del ununpentio, los investigadores también han tenido acceso a datos que ofrecen una visión más detallada de la estructura y propiedades de los núcleos atómicos superpesados.

Un comité internacional revisará los nuevos hallazgos para decidir si se necesitan más experimentos antes de que el descubrimiento del nuevo elemento sea reconocido de forma oficial.

Fuente: Universidad de Lund via SINC

El elemento 115 fue sintetizado por primera vez en 2004 por científicos estadounidenses y rusos y sus propiedades posteriormente fueron confirmados en varios experimentos hasta que los científicos de la Universidad de Lund han ofrecido las confirmaciones finales necesarias para hacer al elemento 115 oficial. 

El tiempo de vida medio más largo para el elemento 115 hasta la fecha es de aproximadamente 200 milisegundos, así que no se recomendaría hacer algo de valor del nuevo elemento.

Chasing the Higgs Boson

Illustration by Sean McCabe/Photographs by Daniel Auf der Mauer, Toni Albir, Fabrice Coffrini, Fred Merz

Peter Higgs, center, of the University of Edinburgh, was one of the first to propose the particle’s existence. From left, physicists at CERN who helped lead the hunt for it: Sau Lan Wu, Joe Incandela, Guido Tonelli and Fabiola Gianotti.

At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle.

Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.”

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature’s clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist — to know something that nobody else has ever known — was happening to someone else.

He flew back to Geneva the next day. “My wife was stunned,” he recalled.

He would not see them again for months.

Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had every reason to believe that they were closing in on the Great White Whale of modern science: the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain all the others then known and how they fit together into the jigsaw puzzle of reality.

For almost half a century, physicists had chased its quantum ghost through labyrinths of mathematics and logic, and through tons of electronics at powerful particle colliders, all to no avail.

Now it had come down to the Large Hadron Collider, where two armies of physicists, each 3,000 strong, struggled against each other and against nature, in a friendly but deadly serious competition.

In physics tradition, they were there to check and complement each other in a $10 billion experiment too valuable to trust to only one group, no matter how brilliant and highly motivated.

The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe. (The other theorists were François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl R. Hagen of the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University.)

Elementary particles — the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our DNA and our iPhones — would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line.

Without this mystery field, everything in the universe would be pretty much the same, a bland fizz of particles running around at the speed of light. With it, there could be atoms and stars, and us.

Leon Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois, where the boson was being sought, once called it “the God particle,” scandalizing his colleagues but delighting journalists, who kept using the name. Dr. Lederman later said that he wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”

The “Easter Bump Hunt” of April 2011, as it came to be called, was only one episode in a roller coaster of sleepless nights, bright promises, missed clues, false alarms, euphoria, depression, gritty calculation, cooperation and envy, all the tedium and vertiginous notions of modern science.

On the way to fulfill what they thought was their generation’s rendezvous with scientific destiny, the physicists dangled from harnesses in hard hats to construct detectors bigger than apartment buildings in underground caverns. They strung wires and cranked bolts to coax thousand-ton magnets to less than a thousandth of an inch of where they needed to be. They wrote millions of lines of code to calibrate and run devices that would make NASA engineers stand by the track with their hats in their hands in admiration.

In their down time, they proposed marriage and made rap videos in the tunnels where subatomic particles collided. They ate, slept and partied, threw snowballs and worried that an unguarded smile in the cafeteria or a glance at a friend’s laptop could bias a half-billion-dollar experiment or give away cosmic secrets.

Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way in an e-mail, “The experiments are very large collaborations and they have the good, the bad, the crooks, the Sopranos, the opportunists — a prototype of the world as we know it.”

By DENNIS OVERBYE

nytimes.com