Numerous blockbusters of recent years, most of which are adaptations of comics, have firmly planted the image of a superhero in the consciousness of modern man. A superhero is most often an ordinary-looking person who has supernatural powers and is often forced to lead a secretive lifestyle because of this. These films are so popular, colorful and numerous that for some people the concept of "superhero" becomes commonplace. The idea of ​​the reality of such heroes is visited by people more and more often - therefore, such plots as teleportation in China appear and are very popular.

Superman on the road

In the fall of 2012, one of the main hits on the World Wide Web was a video that allegedly recorded not just a human teleportation, but a very dramatic teleportation of two people at once. The video posted on YouTube video hosting has a duration of about a minute and looks like shooting from a street surveillance camera. The time of events, judging by the timing in the upper left corner, is just after midnight on May 9, 2012. The place of events is one of the urban or suburban intersections of China. There are three main characters. The first is a driver of a truck with a white van, the second is a cyclist. The third is a mysterious stranger, whose face is not visible because of the wide hood. In terms of physique, this clearly young man can be both a boy and a girl.

The events in the video unfold as follows. After several passing cars, a truck appears in the background, gradually picking up speed. As he approaches, a cyclist emerges from a darkened area to the left along a side road. The trajectories and speeds of the truck and the cyclist are such that a collision seems inevitable, and the consequences for the driver of a lighter vehicle promise to be fatal. But here, in the right darkened area of ​​the screen, there is some movement: a swift, blurry silhouette is approaching the place of the impending collision. At the last moment, the silhouette is outlined more clearly and the viewer sees a man who grabs a cyclist almost under the very wheels of the car. After that, the stranger, the cyclist and the bike literally disappear, and the truck begins to brake. The car has not yet come to a complete stop when, on the far right side of the screen, just on the illuminated part of the road, a group of two people and a bicycle appears. The stranger releases the rescued, while his hands glow brightly. He throws a hood over his head and hurries out of the way. At this time, a visibly shocked cyclist sits down on the curb without strength, a truck driver who has come out and finds nothing on the roadway is heading towards him.

It is easy to deceive those who are glad to be deceived

Human teleportation in China, especially recorded on video and in addition under such cinematic circumstances, very quickly became known and gained millions of views on video hosting. Lively discussions immediately began as to whether the video was real or whether it was a prank by some visual effects specialists. It is curious that there were quite a lot of supporters of the reality of the teleportation observed on the set. Even peculiar “fanfictions” immediately arose - plots began to be invented to create the story of a superhero girl (the female character seemed more intriguing and impressive to the majority of the audience), to reveal the reasons that prompted her to hide her superpowers and the like.

But there were a lot of skeptical critics, and they literally decomposed the video literally by bones. A lot of rational arguments were made in favor of the fact that the plot is staged, bears obvious traces of the use of software for converting video material, and also has obvious logical flaws. First of all, the very occurrence of a potentially deadly accident alerted: contrary to custom, the truck, when approaching the intersection, did not slow down, but pick up speed, as if creating conditions for a dramatic scene. The suspicion of the cyclist is also suspicious: he rode surprisingly calmly right under the wheels, not changing speed and not even turning his head when crossing the main road, where he must give way to traffic priority. Not everything is in order with the truck driver - the footage clearly shows that the person who got out of the cab is dressed in a bright white T-shirt or shirt. But in a fairly well-lit cabin, during braking, not only is nothing bright visible, there is no driver at all.

As for the mysterious person with the ability to teleport himself and teleport others, he is not so "clean" either. First, there are obvious traces of video editing in its "energy trail" during an ultra-fast dash to the road. His silhouette at the moment of grabbing the cyclist is very distinct, while the blurry silhouette of his movement is still preserved. Secondly, the choice of the end point of teleportation looks very strange. The laws of geometry, physics and just logic say that the easiest and most natural thing would be to move the rescued cyclist in the direction of the stranger - that is, to the left side of the screen, away from the road. But teleportation happens with the reverse vector, to the right - it turns out that the stranger made a kind of loop during teleportation, which has no explanation. Secondly, a vague doubt creeps in that the appearance of two teleporting people and a bicycle on the right side of the road is explained, so to speak, by stage necessity. It is this part that is the most illuminated in the entire scene, so to achieve the greatest drama, to observe the shock state of the rescued, the luminous hands of the savior and his removal into darkness, it is best suited. The totality of all these observations and reasoning leads to the conclusion that this teleportation is quite creative, but still a hoax.

Alexander Babitsky

MOSCOW, July 12 - RIA Novosti. Physicists in Shanghai claim to have successfully carried out the first "cosmic" quantum teleportation by relaying information about the state of a particle from the Mo Tzu quantum satellite to a tracking station on Earth, according to an article posted in the electronic library arXiv.org

“We announce the first quantum teleportation of single photons from an observatory on Earth to a satellite in near-Earth orbit, 1,400 kilometers away from it. The successful implementation of this task paves the way for ultra-long-range teleportation and is the first step towards creating a quantum Internet,” write Jian -Wei Pan (Jian-Wei Pan) from the University of Shanghai and his colleagues.

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement is the basis of modern quantum technologies. This phenomenon, in particular, plays an important role in secure quantum communication systems - such systems completely exclude the possibility of imperceptible "wiretapping" due to the fact that the laws of quantum mechanics prohibit "cloning" of the state of light particles. At present, quantum communication systems are being actively developed in Europe, China, and the USA.

In recent years, scientists from Russia and foreign countries have created dozens of quantum communication systems, the nodes of which can exchange data over fairly large distances, which are about 200-300 kilometers. All attempts to expand these networks to the international and intercontinental level have encountered insurmountable difficulties related to the way light is attenuated when traveling through optical fiber.

For this reason, many teams of scientists have thought about transferring quantum communication systems to the "cosmic" level, exchanging information via satellite, allowing you to restore or strengthen the "invisible connection" between entangled photons. The first spacecraft of this kind is already in orbit - it is the Chinese satellite Mo Tzu, launched into space in August 2016.

This week, Pan and his colleagues reported on the first successful quantum teleportation experiments carried out aboard the Mo-Tzu and at a communications station in Ngari, Tibet, built at an altitude of four kilometers to communicate with the first quantum satellite.

Quantum teleportation was first described at a theoretical level in 1993 by a group of physicists led by Charles Bennett. According to their idea, atoms or photons can exchange information at any distance if they were "entangled" at the quantum level.

To carry out this process, a conventional communication channel is required, without which we cannot read the state of entangled particles, which is why such "teleportation" cannot be used to transmit data over astronomical distances. Despite this limitation, quantum teleportation is of great interest to physicists and engineers because it can be used to transmit data in quantum computers and to encrypt data.

Guided by this idea, the scientists entangled two pairs of photons in the laboratory in Ngari, and transmitted one of the four "entangled" particles aboard the Mo-Tzu using a laser. The satellite simultaneously measured the state of both this particle and another photon that was on board at that moment, as a result of which information about the properties of the second particle was instantly "teleported" to the Earth, changing the behavior of the "ground" photon entangled with the first particle.

In total, as Chinese physicists say, they managed to "entangle" and teleport over 900 photons, which confirmed the correctness of the "Mo-Dzy" and proved that two-way "orbital" quantum teleportation is possible in principle. In a similar way, as scientists note, it is possible to transmit not only photons, but also qubits, memory cells of a quantum computer, and other objects of the quantum world.

Last year, a Long March 2D rocket took off from the Gobi Desert and placed the Mo Tzu satellite in orbit in synchronism with the Sun, so it makes its way around the Earth every day. Mo Tzu is a highly sensitive satellite designed to transmit quantum information. It can detect the quantum states of individual photons released from the surface of our planet.

Today, the Mo Tzu team announced their unique achievement: they have succeeded in creating the first ground-to-ground satellite quantum network. This network was used to teleport the first object in history from Earth into its orbit. Teleportation is carried out by scientists who have conducted experiments in the field of optical physics. This process is based on the strange phenomenon of entanglement, during which two photons form a single point in time and space. From a technical point of view, they are described by a single wave function.

A feature of quantum entanglement is that these two photons exist at the same point, even if there are kilometers between them. Thus, a change in the state of one instantly affects the state of the other. Back in the 90s of the last century, scientists realized that they could use this phenomenon to teleport objects from one point of the Universe to another.

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The idea is to "load" information into one photon, then the other becomes identical to the first. This is teleportation

Such experiments have been carried out many times in laboratory conditions on Earth, but this is the first time they have been tested in interstellar space. Teleportation is of great importance for a whole range of technologies related to quantum networks and computing.

In fact, there is no maximum distance for teleportation of photons, but the connection created between them is too fragile and can be destroyed due to foreign matter that has appeared in the atmosphere or in the optical fiber. To confirm their theory, scientists conducted experiments all the time at a greater distance, and now they went into orbit. True, for this it was necessary to build a station in Tibet at an altitude of 4 thousand meters.

As part of the experiment, entangled pairs of photons were created, which were launched at a speed of 4000 m/s

Quantum teleportation experiments successfully completed in China and Canada

© СС0

In China and Canada, experiments have been successfully carried out to conduct quantum teleportation over a distance of more than eight kilometers. These experiments in the conditions of the city were carried out independently by scientists from the two countries.

According to the South China Morning Post, previously such experiments were carried out only in the laboratory. Quantum teleportation is the transmission over a distance of a quantum state of matter, which is destroyed at the sending point and then recreated at the receiving point without a direct transfer of the particle itself.

A group of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China has teleported photons over a distance of 12.5 km in the city of Hefei (east China's Anhui province). For this, conventional fiber optic networks were used.

Canadian scientists conducted a similar experiment in the city of Calgary (southwestern province of Alberta) at a distance of 8.2 km.

The specialists of the two countries used different approaches. The Chinese, through their channel, teleported only two photons per hour, but with higher reliability. The Canadians, on the other hand, were able to transmit up to 17 particles per minute, but their technology is less accurate and has a number of limitations for practical use.

Last year, American scientists managed to send a photon over a distance of more than 100 km, but only within the laboratory - through a fiber optic cable wound in turns there, reports

System for preparing entangled states and transferable states for teleportation

The mission team of the QUESS Quantum Communications Satellite (aka "Mo-Tzu") has reported the first success in teleporting photons from the Earth's surface into orbit. As part of a month-long experiment, physicists managed to teleport 911 photons over a distance of 500 to 1,400 kilometers. These are record distances for quantum teleportation. The preprint of the study is published on the arXiv.org server, briefly reported by the MIT Technology Review.

Quantum teleportation consists in transferring the quantum state of one particle to another particle without directly transferring the first particle in space. To teleport, for example, the polarization of a photon would require a pair of quantum entangled particles. One of the entangled particles must be kept by the sender of the quantum state, and the second by the receiver. Then the sender makes a measurement simultaneously on the transmitted particle and one of the particles of the entangled pair. Quantum entanglement is designed in such a way that two particles behave as a single system - an entangled particle at the recipient feels that a measurement has been taken with its pair and changes its state. Knowing the measurement result on the sender's side (it can be sent via the usual channel), you can get an exact copy of the sent particle - immediately at the recipient. You can read more about this in our quantum alphabet material: "".

Previously, the distance for teleportation was limited to tens of kilometers - in 2012, Austrian physicists teleported the states of photons between La Palma and Tenerife (143 kilometers). The new work overcomes this milestone and improves it several times.

One of the main tasks for teleportation - the distribution of entangled photons between the sender (on Earth) and the recipient (satellite) - has already been solved by physicists. The work on creating an entangled pair divided by 1200 kilometers was a month ago in the magazine Science. With the use of these pairs, it remained only to experimentally demonstrate the teleportation itself.

Experiment scheme

Ji-Gang Ren et al. / arXiv.org, 2017

In the new work, the authors used an entangled photon generator installed not on a satellite, but on Earth, at the Ngari Observatory (Tibet). It created over four thousand entangled pairs per second, one photon of each being sent as a laser beam to a satellite that flew over the generator every midnight. First, scientists showed that quantum entanglement persists between the Earth and the satellite, and then carried out teleportation of the photon polarization. In fact, to reliably test teleportation, scientists needed to create not one, but two entangled pairs of photons at once.

The biggest losses were associated with the turbulence and inhomogeneity of the Earth's atmosphere. These effects lead to a broadening of the beam of entangled photons and their scattering - which means that fewer particles reach the satellite.

In total, 911 particles were successfully teleported - and during the entire experiment, millions of photon pairs were prepared and transmitted. The authors note that the accuracy of teleportation reaches 80 percent, and the losses range from 41 to 52 decibels (one photon flies out of 100 thousand). If a similar signal is transmitted over a 1200-kilometer optical fiber with a loss level of 0.2 decibels per kilometer, then it will take 20 times more time to transmit even a single photon than the lifetime of the universe.

Quantum teleportation is one of the important methods of data transmission in quantum telecommunications. It is necessary for the development of a global "quantum Internet" with ideally protected communication channels (at the level of physical laws prohibiting the cloning of quantum states). Last year protocols for quantum teleportation of physics on urban fiber optic lines.

Vladimir Korolev