Telepotation: hope for the future?
Beam me down, Scotty
Teleportation goes long distance
By Paul Rincon
BBC News Online science staff
Long distance teleportation is crucial if dreams of superfast quantum computing are to be realised.
When physicists say "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of key properties from one particle to another without a physical link.
The team has published its findings in the academic journal Nature.
Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800m-long optical fibre fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube.
The link establishes a channel between the labs, dubbed Alice and Bob. This enables the properties, or "quantum states", of light particles to be transferred between the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob).
In the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines.
The Austrian team encoded their qubits using a property of light particles, also called photons, known as polarisation. This property describes the direction in which they oscillate.
Quantum teleportation relies on an aspect of physics known as "entanglement"; whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".
Jen sent the following comment:
Beam me up, Gilly! This is actually pretty cool. And, even if we only can do it in a few square miles, imagine being able to "instant-wire" a
whole city like NYC. Talk about "spin doctoring!" :D This is why I love technology--it just keeps getting cooler.
Which why I like geek girls. They like the coolest things. Also further proof Jen is smarter than me, because I don't understand what this is all about. Which is why Kos posts about science and I post about food and football. Infantry tactics in Najaf, yes. Teleportation, no.
posted by Steve @ 12:41:00 PM
