This was about a tantalizing paper
from Hooters and Asher Peres
that had shown that
if you have 3 imperfectly
distinguishable
polarization states of a photon, for example
vertical of 120 degrees and 240 degrees
we call that the mercedes-benz states
that in principally you can only
distinguished two reliably
the perpendicular states but if you have 3 that are
120 degree angles
they're not perfectly distinguishable.
You're given
two copies of this and what Peres and Hooters
investigated was how much better
could you distinguish them by
complicated measurement
than you could by a simple measurement.
They found that you could distinguish
them better by
a joint measurement by having them both
in the same lab than by doing separate measurements.
Even if you're allowed to talk back and
forth and do very
gentle measurements like measure little bit
about this and I tell the result to the
other person and they measure the other
one
and then they talk back and forth for 20 iterations.
It still isn't as good as having them both in
the same place. We're trying to figure
out what is it that they,
what is it that they don't have
that they need that would enable them to
do as well
if they were in separate locations than
if they were in the same location.
Finally we figured out it was, they needed
something entanglement.
So in other words it was pointed
out even in the original
of Peres Hooters paper, that this
effect was a duel to the
phenomenon of entanglement that is an entanglement
two particles that are prepared in the
same place
behave in a strange way when you measure
them separately
and here are two particles that are
prepared separately
and yet you can find out more of them by
measuring them together
and then by measuring them separately so
that duality
pointed out in the original paper by Peres and Hooters
but it was a paper that
it was a very stimulating paper but it
didn't solve the problem is that why we
don't understand why this is
the case. So then we realized that by
sharing
entanglement between the two observers and
by permitting them to communicate
you could simulate being in the same
place and
we of course started sending the
emails
to Asher Peres in Israel.
The rest of us were all exchanging emails
right after this talk because it was a stimulating
conversation and Peres was saying well
it's as if,
as if one of the parties has some
long-handled measuring tools that he can
measure even though it's not in the same place
and finally we realized what was doing what
was happening is that by
by doing a joint measurement on one
particle and one half of an entangled pair,
you were, you were recreating the state
of the,
of that particle in the other lab and I suggested
the name teleportation
for it and Asher Peres said oh
that is barbarism it's mixing Greek and
Latin roots you should
stick with the Greek route and call it "telepheresis"
but the other people all like teleportation
better so we stuck with that.
One of our colleagues who was, who is
talking to us much of the time but wasn't
actually working on this one
said was Ben Schumacher and he said
oh I'm glad I'm not part of this because you've given it a name
that will produce all kinds of
misunderstanding.
