[This is a “literature impression“.]
Masahiro Hotta has a series of paper about what he calls “quantum energy teleportation (QET)”, modeled after the well-known notion of quantum teleportation (of information). Although it sounds like crazy crack pot stuff, and they contain the red-flag term “zero-point energy”, the basic physics of Hotta’s work are sound. But they don’t appear to have important consequences for energy transmission.
The idea is to exploit the fact that the ground state of the vacuum in QFT is, in principle, entangled over arbitrary distances. In a toy Alice and Bob model with respective systems and
, you assume a Hamiltonian for which the ground state is unique and entangled. Then, Alice makes a local measurement on her system
. Neither of the two conditional global states for the joint
system — conditional on the outcome of the measurement — are eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, and so therefore the average energy must increase for the joint system. The source of this energy is the device Alice used to make the measurement. Now, if Bob were to independently make a measurement of his system, he would find that energy would also necessarily flow from his device into the joint system; this follows from the symmetry of the problem. But if he waits for Alice to transmit to him the outcome of her result, it turns out that he can apply a local unitary to his
system and a subsequent local measurement that leads to a net average energy flow to his equipment. The fact that he must wait for the outcome of Alice’s measurement, which travels no faster than the speed of light, is what gives this the flavor of teleportation.… [continue reading]