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.
