Scientists Demonstrate Teleportation with Atoms
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - It is not quite the "Beam me up Scotty" teleportation of
Star Trek, but teams of scientists said Wednesday they had made properties
jump from one atom to another without using any physical link.
Physicists in the United States and Austria for the first time have
teleported "quantum states" between separate atoms.
The breakthrough may not yet make it possible for people to disappear and
reappear somewhere else, like actors in a science fiction television show.
But it could help lead to "quantum computing" technology that would make
superfast computers.
Quantum states include physical properties such as energy, motion and
magnetic field.
"We've done it for the first time with massive particles, with atoms,"
Rainer Blatt, of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Reuters in a
telephone interview.
Two years ago scientists at the Australian National University announced
they had teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a
split second.
Blatt and his colleagues and another team of scientists at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, reported
the first teleportation of atoms in two reports in the science journal
Nature.
The basic theory of quantum teleportation was outlined in 1993 by physicist
Charles Bennett and his colleagues.
Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the
quantum states of the atoms.
"Using teleportation as we've reported could allow logic operations to be
performed much more quickly," physicist David Wineland, the leader of the
NIST team, explained in a statement.
The research involved quantum entanglement -- in which the quantum states of
two or more particles are linked without physical contact.
"There are quite a few implications ... more on the scientific side," Blatt
said. "We are far away from beamers, like beam me up Scotty," he added.
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