An Australian research team claimed on Monday to have successfully ”teleported” a message-encoded laser beam of light in a world breakthrough that turns science fiction into reality.
Using a process known as ”quantum entanglement”, the team based at Canberra’s Australian National University (ANU), dissembled a laser at one end of an optical communications system and recreated a replica a metre away.
Although the distance was tiny, the team leader, Chinese Australian physicist Ping Koy Lam, said the technology was the same as that used aboard the starship ”Enterprise” in the sci-fi series ”Star Trek”.
Teleportation is the disembodiment of an object in one location and its immediate reconstruction in another location — ”beam me up, Scotty.”
”However, there are some differences,” Lam said on Monday. ”We cannot teleport matter yet so all we have done is that we have teleported photons within a beam of laser.”
The most likely application of the process in the short term is dramatically improved communication systems and the creation of a new generation of computers with enormously improved speed.
”There is a serious potential application in using teleportation as a basic component of a new class of quantum computers,” Lam told ABC radio.
”If we were to build this class of computer predictions are that it is going to be a million to a billion times faster than the best computer available nowadays”
Lam said his team had made a measurement of the laser beam by destroying it and then sending the measured result from one part of the laboratory to another part where an exact replica was reconstructed.
The ANU team has won a global race with researchers in the United States and Europe to reliably and consistently transmit a laser beam although a US team pioneered teletransportation with photons (small particles of light) in 1997.
Then a Danish team established a theoretical means of teleporting atoms last October.
The research, partly funded by the Australian Research Council, was unveiled by The Australian newspaper which said the process involved an encoded radio signal which was embodied on an input laser.
The laser was combined with quantum entanglement and then scanned and destroyed in the process.
But the radio signal survived and was sent electronically to a receiving station where within a nanosecond an exact replica of the beam with radio signal intact was retrieved and decoded.
Lam said quantum teleportation could also provide new encryption technology for banks and governments and speed up information traffic.
But for the teleportation of a human as in the Enterprise, a machine would have to be built to pinpoint and analyse the trillions of atoms that make up the human body, which is still far off.
”But that doesn’t mean that in the far future it’s not possible,” Lam said. – Sapa-AFP