I'm confused about part of quantum encryption.
Alice sends a photon to Bob. If Eve tries to measure the polarization, and measures it on the wrong axis, there's a chance Bob won't get the result Alice sent. From what I understand, if Eve copies the photon, using a laser or some other method of getting entangled photons, and she measures the copied photon, the same result will happen to Bob. What happens if Eve copies the photon, and waits until Bob reads it before she does?
Also, you referred to virtual particles as a convenient fiction when responding to someone else. I assumed that they were akin to a particle being in a place with more potential energy than there is energy in a system during quantum tunneling. The particle is real. It's just that due to the fact that the kinetic energy is negative, it behaves in a way that makes the waveform small at any real distance. Was I completely off base?
Also, should I have just edited my old post instead of adding a new one?
What happens if Eve copies the photon, and waits until Bob reads it before she does?
Not my field, but it seems to me that it should be the same thing that happens if Bob tries to read the photon after Eve has already done so. You can only read the quantum information off once. Now, an interesting question is, what happens if Eve goes off into space at near lightspeed, and reads the photon at a time such that the information "Bob has read the photon" hasn't had time to get to her spaceship? If I understand correctly, it doesn't matter! This sce...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.