| Subject: Beam me up Scotty |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 11:45:37 06/18/04 Fri
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "Hubbble telescope to die & be destoyed" on 12:26:05 02/15/04 Sun
Teleportation works - but not for Scotty
Tim Radford, science editor
Thursday June 17, 2004
The Guardian
Captain Kirk and Mr Spock are as far away as ever - but in separate experiments in Austria and in Colorado, scientists have once again demonstrated that teleportation works.
The two groups report in Nature today that using a bizarre phenomenon called quantum entanglement, they teleported information about quantum states between atoms without using any physical links. In effect, they did not beam up the Cheshire cat, just the Cheshire cat's smile. That is, they transmitted not the atom but its quantum state - its energy, motion, magnetic field and so on - to another atom.
Such experiments could pay off one day with the development of quantum computers, which would be able to tackle problems that right now defy the world's fastest supercomputers. A team at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology used laser beam manipulations to transfer quantum states from one beryllium atom to another. And a group at the University of Innsbruck describe the teleportation of a quantum state between two calcium atoms.
Both groups used ions - atoms with electrons dislodged - and both exploited the strange properties of the quantum world. At the sub-atomic scale matter behaves unexpectedly. Ions can be persuaded into a special state called superposition in which they can literally be in two places at once. They can be entangled with each other, so that their behaviour is linked in predicatble ways, as if they were connected by an invisible force. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance".
Physicists have been playing with this kind of teleportation now for more than five years. The technique could be useful for transporting information in tomorrow's quantum computers, no bigger that a thimble but capable of solving problems that are too big for today's state of the art machines. But although researchers have repeatedly teleported quantum information, nobody has yet transferred a single atom.
And as for Star Trek-style teleportation, forget it: it would require exact information about every atom in each Federation officer's body. The stack of computer discs needed to store this quantity of data would reach at least a third of the way to the centre of the galaxy.
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