"Fifteen-photon entanglement?"
By the path.
Hearing Academician Pan say those words, Xu Yun's pupils suddenly contracted. He blurted out, an exceptionally rare lapse:
"Director Pan, fifteen photons? Has the Quantum Information Laboratory's technical reserve already reached that level?"
Photon entanglement was a key metric of the fundamental capabilities of quantum information processing. The more entangled photons one could manipulate, the more the capacity for quantum information processing would grow exponentially.
There was an academic term for this: a multiphoton entangled state. It involved the concept of quantum teleportation.
If that sentence didn't make sense, that was all right. There was a more straightforward explanation:
Quantum teleportation could be thought of as an infinitely microscopic science-fiction teleportation array.
Yes, the kind where you draw a circle, stand inside it, and then, after a flash of green light, you're transported somewhere else.
Its principle was to use the entanglement between photons to teleport bits of information out of thin air to another location over a classical channel—in other words, under conditions consistent with relativity.
A person, or any macroscopic object, could be regarded as being composed of countless microscopic particles. So, as long as the technology was sufficiently advanced, it was theoretically possible to disassemble a person → teleport them → and reassemble them.
Of course.
Quantum teleportation was only the embryonic form of a teleportation array. It still had an incredibly long way to go before it could truly teleport macroscopic objects.
Twelve grams of carbon atoms made one mole, or 6.023*10^23 atoms.
If a person weighed 60 kilograms, and we assumed they were made entirely of carbon atoms, they would contain roughly 5,000 moles of atoms, or 3*10^27 atoms.
Let's say it took ten degrees of freedom to describe the state of one atom.
Then describing a person would require