Are, first, how to teleport a living organism – newspaper Zocalo

ABC.ES / España.- Never before have we been so close to Star Trek and stunning teleporter that allowed the crew of the Starship Enterprise dematerialize at one point and reappear instantaneously in another. A joint team of researchers from Purdue University in the United States, and Tsinghua in China, has developed, in fact, the first scheme made so far to teleport the internal quantum state (memory) of a living organism to another. The research is a breakthrough in the way, today own science fiction, teleportation complete living beings.

Tongcan proposed by Li and Zhang Yin-qi scheme foresees the use of electromechanical oscillators and superconducting circuits to achieve its ambitious goal. In an article published in Science Bulletin, the researchers also propose a scheme to create a state of “Schrödinger’s Cat” in which a microorganism can be in two places at once.

In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger He proposed a thought experiment that was to enclose a live cat inside a box that had also introduced a test tube with poisonous gas and a device, a single radioactive particle and having a 50% probability of disintegrating in a given time . The disintegration of the particle, the poison would be released and the cat would die without remedy. Once past the time set, we would have a 50% probability that the particle has disintegrated and find that the cat is dead, and another 50% that did not happen and the cat alive. In the language of quantum physics, this would be a superposition of two states (live or dead) that will not be realized until the moment the box is opened. Until then, indeed, we could say without fear of contradiction that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. Just opening the box modify the superposition state and make that one of the two possibilities is realized.
Realities “impossible”

The idea of ​​Schrödinger served to reveal for the first time to the general public the deep implications of quantum mechanics, in whose reign the superposition of states of the particles is the order of the day and is fairly routine for investigators, who have had to adjust to realities “impossible” as electrons are in several places at Once particles that communicate instantaneously regardless of distance or even are able to travel in time. From the Schroedinger hypothetical experiment, physicists have dedicated decades of study and effort to try to find out whether the strange laws in the quantum universe can also move to the macroscopic world. And, after all, we and everything around us is made of particles.

Of course, we have already made significant progress. And in the last two decades, several research groups have achieved increasingly better results when “teleport” quantum states, first of individual particles (single photon in 1997) after complete atoms, and ultimately sets every time more numerous atoms. Recently, for example, a team from the University of Colorado managed to bring the quantum state a whole membrada aluminum 15 microns in diameter (one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter), and “teleport” their characteristics and movement to a series of single photons.

But no one has managed to do the same with a living organism. And all the experiments carried out so far are still far from achieving teleport an organism, or its quantum state.
Quantum Bacteria

In their study, Tongcang and Zhang Li Yin-qi propose placing a bacterium on an integrated circuit for a superconducting quantum superposition state in the body and after that state teletransportar electromechanical oscillator. In principle, the organism is much smaller than the membrane oscillator and should not, therefore, affect its operation. The bacteria together with the membrane, would be brought to a quantum state. After which, the state could teleport to another distant body through superconducting microwave circuits. Since the internal states of the organism contain information, the proposal involves researchers actually a scheme to teleport the information, or memory, of a living organism to another.

The proposed configuration Li Tongcang and Zhang-Qi Yin is also a powerful microscope, and that is not only able to detect the existence of the spin of individual electrons (which may be associated with certain genetic defects), but can also manipulate and detect their quantum states, allowing its use as “quantum memories”.

In the words of Li, “we propose a simple method to put a microorganism in two places at once, and facilitate a scheme to teleport the quantum state of a whole organism. I hope our work will inspire other researchers to think seriously about the possibility of quantum teleportation of microorganisms and their future possibilities. Our work also provides clues for future studies on the effects of biochemical reactions in quantum superposition states of living organisms “.