Teleported! Bits Vanish Here, Reappear There

For the first time, researchers have teleported 10,000 bits of information per second from point A to point B across a distance of about six millimeters and inside a solid state circuit, similar to a computer chip.

Although the accomplishment differs from teleporting mass, like a person — such as that seen on science fiction shows like Star Trek — the remarkable feat demonstrates what could be possible with a quantum computer.

The scientists, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, report their findings in this week’s issue of Nature.

In their experiment, the team spaced three micron-sized electronic circuits on a seven-by-seven-millimeter computer chip. Two of the circuits worked as a sending mechanism, while the other served as the receiver. The scientists cooled the chip to near absolute zero and ran a current through the circuits.

At that frigid temperature and small scale, the electrons in the circuit — which are the quantum bits of information, the qubits — started to behave according to the rules of quantum mechanics. The qubits became entangled. This means they become linked, sharing identical quantum states, even if physically separated from one other.

Specifically, the qubits in the sender circuit became entangled with those in the receiving circuit. The ETH team encoded some information into the qubits in the sending circuits and then measured of the state of the qubits in the receiver circuit. Whatever state the qubits had been in the sender was reflected instantly in the receiving circuit. The researchers had teleported the information.

This is different from the way information is sent in ordinary computers, electrons carry information along wires or through the air via radio waves. In this case, no bit of data physically traveled along a route — instead the information disappeared from one location and reappeared at another.

Other experimenters have teleported quantum bits, too, and have done so across a larger distance. But those teams only got the teleportation to work once in a while, perhaps a few percent of the time. The ETH team was also able to teleport up to 10,000 quantum bits every second, and get it to work right consistently. That’s fast enough and accurate enough to build a useful computer. “Basically we can push a button and have this teleportation work every time,” Andreas Wallraff, Professor at the Department of Physics and head of the study, told DNews.

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John Carlisle: This store is the stuff of nuclear dreams | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

EAST LANSING — You can ask Bob Lazar about the uranium for sale at his store. Feel free to inquire about the infrared death ray he sells, too. But please don’t ask him about the time he spent at Area 51 working on UFOs.

Lazar is the owner of United Nuclear Scientific Equipment and Supplies, a mom-and-pop business unlike any other.

It’s not like the science supply stores of the old days, which sold chemistry sets and microscopes for kids. At United Nuclear, you can stock a mad scientist’s radioactive dream supplies because the items are either exempt from government regulations or are below amounts or concentrations considered dangerous.

Customers are free to go home with radioactive isotopes, rockets or a Van de Graaff generator that can produce up to 600,000 volts.

You can buy magnets so powerful they’ll bore through walls, furniture or even your body to get at each other.

You can get X-ray components to take X-rays of things around the house. A photo inside the store’s catalog shows how someone used the equipment to get a glimpse inside their frog.

You can purchase a real death ray, which emits an invisible infrared beam so powerful that “a direct hit will blast right through your goggles and turn your eye instantly and permanently into charcoal,” as the catalog warns. It can cut steel, shatter glass, burn wood, chip rock and vaporize skin. A small one is about $600.

And you can get a chunk of uranium that you can hold in your hand — as Lazar did on a recent afternoon, merrily putting a Geiger counter next to it to show that the rock was indeed radioactive.

“Few people in the world ever get to hold it,” the 54-year-old said. “It’s not going to hurt you, but it’s radioactive. The things is, that’s exactly one of the things we’re trying to dispel — people have this built-in fear of uranium. But there’s a lot of radioactive stuff in everyone’s lives.”

Yet despite owning a store that’s drawn the keen interest of law enforcement, lunatics and laymen, Lazar is still most notorious for once saying on television that he helped reverse engineer a real flying saucer in the real Area 51.

“I wish I wouldn’t have said anything, but it’s too late for that,” he said. “I think I finally came to the conclusion that, you know, that was a really stupid thing to say. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Now it’s impossible to get away from.”

A UFO legend

Lazar always seems to draw attention.

Thirty years ago, he was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he said his unusual ideas about physics got him noticed. He was soon tapped for a new job in a place that he says turned out to be Area 51, the legendary secret facility where many people are convinced UFOs are housed.

Lazar said he was hired to reverse engineer an alien spacecraft to figure out its propulsion system. Spoiler alert: They travel by creating gravity and using it to distort time and space, he said — and look exactly like the flying saucers in the hokey old science-fiction movies.

But he claims he got fired when he brought some friends to the desert to view the facility’s weekly UFO test flights.

He panicked and feared for his safety, he said, so he gave an interview to a Las Vegas TV station, recounting everything he said he saw and did at Area 51. And for that, he’s earned a permanent spot in UFO royalty.

He’s since shied away from the flying saucer spotlight and focuses instead on his unusual retail business.

Easier said than done, though.

To this day, most of the calls coming to the store are from people who desperately want to reach the real Bob Lazar and ask him what it’s like to work on a UFO. He stopped answering the phone long ago.

Lazar’s wife, Joy White, does the accounting for United Nuclear and sometimes answers calls, though she, too, now avoids it. There are just too many people a little too frantically eager to speak to her husband.

“‘Please! I have this serious message for him. I have to talk to him,” she quotes them as saying. “It’s kind of amusing. The people are generally, um, interesting.”

Trouble calls

Some people do call the store to actually buy something. And some of them are frightening.

One man kept calling for a certain selection of chemicals, and it dawned on Lazar that he was trying to synthesize deadly sarin gas. Lazar told the FBI.

“They absolutely flipped out,” he said. They tapped the phones, installed cameras and staked out the place, but never got the guy.

Another man was trying to get castor beans to make the poison ricin with Lazar’s help. He also showed a fervent interest in anything radioactive. Another phone call to the feds.

One woman wanted as much radioactive material as she could get to put in her horse’s water. She’d read somewhere that it would strengthen his immune system. Lazar told her it was a misinformed Internet myth.

“Oh, you’re trying to cover it up, too,” she replied.

And a few calls are simply heartbreaking, like the man who was convinced Lazar had a time machine and begged him to let him use it to go back in time and save his son, who’d died in a car accident. He refused to believe Lazar’s denials.

“ ‘Look, I know you have it, and I know you have to say that over the phone,’ ” Lazar remembered him saying. “You know the guy is just so hurt, he wants to do anything. But God.”

His neighbors haven’t always been understanding, either. He once built a four-story Van de Graaff generator in his yard — a giant, shiny, high-voltage globe. “It was a particle accelerator,” he said, matter-of-factly.

Nearby farmers were freaked out. “They just think you’re trying to contaminate their farmland or control their animals,” he said. “I said, ‘I cannot control your animals,’ and they said, ‘Well how come they’re all upset now?’ ”

Why uranium?

Above all, though, nothing raises eyebrows like the mention of uranium.

“You get people calling up on the phone screaming ‘Are you insane? What if people buy a bunch of these and make an atomic bomb?’ ” he said. “Really? So you think you can buy a bunch of rocks and make an atomic bomb? The first atomic bomb took the power of a country to make.”

But at least his stock sparks people’s interest. The relatively unglamorous items he also sells — chemistry sets, beakers and test tubes — just don’t sell well anymore. In an age of video games and the Internet, Lazar said, a simple home chemistry set doesn’t seem as cool to kids as it once did.

You need something like a real death ray to generate some interest.

“When I was a kid, everybody had chemistry sets ... what I was hoping to do with this company is kind of dispel the mystery of science and get people into it. But it takes bigger things to get their attention,” Lazar said.

Then he turned back to the routine things at his store. The clocks on the wall had just been scrambled by a jolt from the Van de Graaff generator, which stood right next to the pile of uranium rocks, which the Geiger counter was hysterically chirping about.