Light Beam's Short Trip May Be a Quantum Leap

Light beam's short trip may be a quantum leap http://www.freep.com/tech/qbeam23.htm

Light beam's short trip may be a quantum leap

October 23, 1998

BY MAGGIE FOX Reuters

WASHINGTON -- Energize!

Hold on to your phaser, Captain Kirk. We're not quite there -- yet.

California researchers said Thursday that they teleported a beam of light across a laboratory bench.

Their experiment transmitted the beam's 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.

Kimble said he thinks the experiment shows quantum teleportation can eventually transform everyday life. Scientists hope that quantum computers, which move information about in this way rather than with wires and silicon chips, will be infinitely faster and more powerful than present-day computers.

"Quantum information is going to be really important for our society, not in five years or 10 years, but if we look into the 100-year time frame, it's hard to imagine that advanced societies don't use" it, Kimble said.

Quantum teleportation allows information to be transmitted at the speed of light without being hindered 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

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mystifies even physicists. Sometimes two particles that are a very long distance apart are somehow twinned, with the properties of one affecting the other.

"Entanglement means if you tickle one, the other one laughs," Kimble said.

In quantum physics, where the normal ideas of what is solid or real do not apply, scientists can use these properties to their advantage.

What Kimble's team did was create two entangled light beams, or streams of photons. Photons, the basic units of light, sometimes act like particles and other times 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 transmitted its properties over a distance of about a yard, Kimble's team reported in the journal Science.

The team worked with light, but Kimble said he thinks teleportation could be applied to solid objects.

Transmitting an object's properties could create a perfect replica.

Could this mean that the transporters of the television and movie science-fiction series "Star Trek," which beam people and objects for huge distances, could one day be a reality?

"I don't think anybody knows the answer," Kimble said.