Teleported light has scientists beaming
By Reuters, 10/23/98
ASHINGTON - They may not be able to ask Scotty to
beam them up yet, but
California researchers said yesterday they had
completed the first ``full''
teleportation experiment.
The researchers said they had teleported a beam of
light across a laboratory bench.
They did not physically transport the beam itself, but
transmitted its properties to
another beam, creating a replica of the first beam.
``We claim this is the first bona fide
teleportation,'' Jeff Kimble, a physics professor at
the California Institute of Technology, said in a
telephone interview.
Kimble said the experiment shows quantum teleportation
can eventually transform
everyday life.
Quantum teleportation allows information to be
transmitted at the speed of light, the
fastest speed possible, without being slowed down by
wires or cables.
The experiment depends on a property known as
entanglement - what Albert Einstein
once described as ``spooky action at a distance.''
It is a property of atomic particles that mystifies
even physicists. Sometimes two
particles that are a very long distance apart are
nonetheless somehow twinned, with
the properties of one affecting the other.
What Kimble's team did was create two entangled light
beams, or streams of photons.
Photons, the basic unit of light, sometimes act like
particles and sometimes like waves.
They used these two entangled beams to carry
information about the quantum state of
a third beam. The first two beams were destroyed in
the process, but the third
successfully transmitted its properties over a
distance of about a yard, Kimble's team
reported in the journal Science.
Although the Caltech team worked with light, Kimble
said he believes teleportation
could be applied to solid objects. For instance, the
quantum state of a photon could
be teleported and applied to a particle, even to an
atom.
``Way beyond sex change operations and genetic
engineering, the quantum state of
one entity could be transported to another entity,''
Kimble said. ``We think we know
how to do that.''
In other words, an object's individual atoms would not
be transported, but
transmitting its properties could create a perfect
replica.