A Leap for Teleporting, Between Ions Feet Apart

[groovedaddy]

Without quite the drama of Alexander Graham Bell calling out, “Mr. Watson, come here!” or the charm of the original “Star Trek” television show, scientists have nonetheless achieved a milestone in communication: teleporting the quantum identity of one atom to another a few feet away.

The contraption is a Rube Goldberg-esque mix of vacuum chambers, fiber optics, lasers and semitransparent beam splitters in a laboratory at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.

Even in the far future, “Star Trek” transporters will probably remain a fantasy, but the mechanism could form an important component in new types of communication and computing.

Quantum teleportation depends on entanglement, one of the strangest of the many strange aspects of quantum mechanics. Two particles can become “entangled” into a single entity, and a change in one instantaneously changes the other even if it is far away.

Previously, physicists have shown that they could use teleportation to transfer information from one photon to another or between nearby atoms. In the new research, the scientists used light to transfer quantum information between two well-separated atoms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/science/03teleportation.html?th&emc=th

[sakabatou]

1. Scotty, one to beam up.

[caraher]

2. I hope you're patient... or highly fault-tolerant

From the New York Times article linked in the OP:

"The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information."

But this is still a great development...

[sakabatou]

3. Sounds a lot like a Microsoft OS

[Thor_MN]

4. Help meeeeee......

[Indenturedebtor]

5. Intergalactic communication anyone?

Or how about ghosts :P