Photon 'afterglow' could transmit information without transmitting energy

[bananas]

http://phys.org/news/2015-03-photon-afterglow-transmit-transmitting-energy.html

Photon 'afterglow' could transmit information without transmitting energy

Mar 31, 2015 by Lisa Zyga feature

(Phys.org)—Physicists have theoretically shown that it is possible to transmit information from one location to another without transmitting energy. Instead of using real photons, which always carry energy, the technique uses a small, newly predicted quantum afterglow of virtual photons that do not need to carry energy. Although no energy is transmitted, the receiver must provide the energy needed to detect the incoming signal—similar to the way that an individual must pay to receive a collect call.

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The proposed protocol has another somewhat unusual requirement: it can only take place in spacetimes with dimensions in which virtual photons can travel slower than the speed of light. For instance, the afterglow would not occur in our 3+1 dimensional spacetime if spacetime were completely flat. However, our spacetime does have some curvature, and that makes the afterglow possible.

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"In that work, it is shown that the afterglow of events that happened in the early Universe carries more information than the light that reaches us from those events," Martín-Martínez said. "This is surprising because, up until now, it has been believed that real quanta, such as real photons of light, are the only carriers of information from the early Universe."

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"The afterglow also occurs in flat spacetime of dimensions other than 3+1," Jonsson said. "It occurs, in particular, in the case where there is only one spatial dimension, such as is effectively the case in an optical fiber. We are currently investigating applications of our results to quantum communication through optical fibers."

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[delrem]

1. I hope Mark Zuckerberg gets right on it!

(that was a joke, by the way!)