Quantum teleportation energy: Is extracting energy from a vacuum a reality?

It's like science fiction, the vacuum energy from one place is transmitted invisible to a distant place.

Written by Yin Zhangqi (Beijing Institute of Technology)

Left: Free energy cannot be extracted from a vacuum state; Right: Conceptual diagram of quantum teleportation energy; Third: Schematic diagram of quantum teleportation energy scheme. Image source: Reference [1]

Quantum teleportation seems to be quite unorthodox, because it is about developing and utilizing vacuum zero-point energy, which is a concept similar to that in science fiction. Therefore, after the paper was published in Physical Review D (PRD) [2], it did not receive much attention. However, Masahiro Horita insisted on developing this idea. In 2011, he and his colleagues proposed that quantum Hall effect could be used to realize quantum teleportation of energy, and they were lucky to apply for funding. Unfortunately, they encountered the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent tsunami, and their experimental facilities were destroyed.

In 2013, Masahiro Horita was invited to give a report in Canada. He told Martín-Martínez and others at the IQC Institute at the University of Waterloo in Canada about this idea, which aroused their interest. They soon discovered that the idea of ​​quantum teleportation of energy could help improve quantum computing technology. When developing quantum computers, one of the key technologies is the initialization of quantum bits, but it faces the limitation of vacuum fluctuations. Using the idea of ​​quantum teleportation of energy, they proposed a theoretical scheme for initializing quantum bits in 2017 [4]. After years of experimental technology improvement, they finally experimentally verified quantum teleportation of energy in a nuclear magnetic resonance system. [5]

In the experiment, they first prepared two atoms to a certain ground state with the lowest energy: a strong local passive state. No energy can be extracted from any local operation on any of the atoms, and there is quantum entanglement between the atoms. Then they applied a pulse to atom A and auxiliary atom C, turning on the coupling between them so that auxiliary atom C obtains part of the information of atom A, and ensures that this operation does not change the energy of atom B. Then they turned on the coupling between atom C and atom B, which is equivalent to transferring the information of atom A to B. After this series of operations, we can use local operations to obtain energy from atom B. The above experimental steps can be completed in just 37 milliseconds, while the time required for energy to be transferred from atom A to atom B is one second, which is much longer than the experimental time. This paper has been accepted by Physical Review Letters (PRL) [6]. Eight months after this experiment was posted on the preprint website, another scholar independently realized the verification of quantum teleportation of energy based on the IBM quantum cloud platform [7].

Although it took 15 years for quantum teleportation to be verified, the current experiment is not very satisfactory. From a theoretical point of view, it is just a kind of quantum simulation. Professor Masahiro Horita is working with others to further develop experimental schemes based on condensed matter systems and to realize quantum teleportation based on edge currents in silicon-based systems (which naturally have quantum entanglement). The theory of quantum teleportation also has potential application value in the fields of black hole physics and quantum field theory in curved spacetime.

References

[1] http://www.tuhep.phys.tohoku.ac.jp/~hotta/extended-version-qet-review.pdf

[2] http://www.tuhep.phys.tohoku.ac.jp/~hotta/

[3] https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.78.045006

[4] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.050502

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16269

[6] https://journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/74074Yf4Fc91c98230f91f68b90ad23c070a51171

[7] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02666

This article is supported by the Science Popularization China Starry Sky Project

Produced by: China Association for Science and Technology Department of Science Popularization

Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

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