A few years ago physicists actually demonstrated that it was possible to teleport very simple systems from one place to another. Now, something with greater immediate application is proposed. The teleportation of energy from one place to another.

The matter teleportation that has been achieved thus far is that of a simple system that is entangled with another system. It’s been done with a photon system, a simple atom and even ions. But it’s not immediately obvious how to scale the system.

A Japanese theorist, Masahiro Hotta has suggested a more immediately achievable idea:

“The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.”

Read the full article here.

So, playing a bit with the idea, let’s say we were to put a giant solar energy collector in orbit around the Sun at the same distance as Mercury. That’s an obvious way to gather energy. The problem is how to transfer the energy back to where we live and where it’s needed.

Teleportation via a set of entangled particles solves that neatly. You might need a series of way points, but that’s simple enough. Isn’t that why God gave us Lagrange points in the first place?

Fun!