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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 30 March 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It reviews quantum entanglement, nonlocality and EPR experiments, and asks whether nonlocal quantum effects could carry observer-to-observer signals faster than light. The paper describes proposed experiments and an example of real-time Earth control of a Mars rover. It concludes that there is no compelling answer yet and that experimental tests are needed.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD reviews quantum entanglement and nonlocality with a focus on whether those phenomena might be usable as a means of faster-than-light communication between observers, especially for real-time space operations over interplanetary distances. The report surveys the relevant quantum experiments and no-signal theorems, then examines proposed communication schemes based mainly on momentum-entangled photons, including scenarios involving superluminal and retro-causal signaling. However, it repeatedly acknowledges that the central question remains unresolved experimentally, and it gives substantial attention to the coherence-versus-entanglement tradeoff and other features of standard quantum mechanics that may prevent usable signaling even if non-local correlations are experimentally validated. Overall, the document is an exploratory analysis of whether quantum nonlocality could conceivably support a practical communications application rather than a demonstration of prospective utility.
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determine the presence or absence of coherent interference, but this will not be
considered further here.)
A quantum sensitive cooled CCD camera is substituted for detector D1 of the Ghost
Interference experiment (Reference 11) and is set to measure distributions like those
shown in Figure 3. In the arrangement in Figure 7, switching the optical fiber routing
can be considered an act of transmitting a binary O or 1 signal. If the switch is in the
position leading to the outer detectors, then which-way information is available, and the
pattern detected by the camera should be a single-slit diffraction pattern labeled "l" in
Figure 7. If the switch is in the position leading to the combiner and middle detector,
waves from both slits contribute to the detection, no which-way information is
available, and the pattern detected by the camera should be the two-slit interference
pattern labeled "0" in Figure 7.
If the pattern observed by the camera can indeed be changed by switching the optical
fiber routing, then this would constitute a direct demonstration on nonlocal
communication. Such an observation would falsify the no-signal theorems mentioned
above, which require that in a noncoincidence scenario, no action on one entangled
photon can produce a "signal-capable" observable result at the detection of the other
entangled photon of the pair.
It should be emphasized that demonstrating nonlocal communication with momentum
entangled photons, as described above, is not the same as actually sending a signal. It
should be clear that no rea l signal can be communicated with a single photon pair. Only
when multiple photons are detected can the underlying distribution function become
apparent. One can estimate that if the distribution functions to be distinguished are a
"pure" two-slit interference pattern modulated by a diffraction envelope and a "pure"
two-slit diffraction pattern, then about 10 photon detections would be required for a 3cr
decision between these two possibilities.
However, as mentioned in the previous section, it is likely that if nonlocal
communication is possible at all, it would have to be accomplished in a situation where
some compromise between entanglement and coherence has been achieved, and such
a compromise would inevitably cause the two patterns to be distinguished to be more
similar and more difficult to separate. Therefore, the 10 photon detections cited above
must be taken as a rather optimistic lower limit, and it is likely that a significantly larger
number of detections (perhaps ~100 or more) would be required. The time required to
send a single bit of information would then be the product of the photon detection rate
in the two arms of the experiment times the number of photons that must be detected
to receive the signal. In principle, such a transmission rate might be improved (and
fluorescence noise suppressed) by pulsing the pump laser, so that "clusters" of
entangled photons would be received with each such pulse.
VII. A Transactional Analysis of the Nonlocal
Communication Test
Now the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (Reference 19) to analyze
the system described above is used. The transactional interpretation describes the
formation of a quantum event as a three-stage process: (1) sending retarded "offer"
waves ('!') from emission location(s), (2) back-in-time responses from the reception
location(s) of advanced "confirmation" waves('!'*), and (3) the formation of a space-
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