teleportation passes another milestone

It’s not “Beam me up, Scotty,” just yet, but teleportation has taken another step forward. Scientists from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Aarhus in Denmark have taken particles of light, destroyed them, and reconstituted them more than a mile away. Previous experiments teleported light particles about 3 feet. Teleportation relies on a strange property of quantum physics called entanglement. When two particles are entangled, whatever happens to one instantly happens to the other, no matter the distance between them. To teleport a particle, however, is not like sending a fax: The first particle’s information is destroyed while it is being reconstituted as an identical particle at another location. This kind of teleportation is still restricted to particles of light, and in the experiment, reported in last week’s Nature, only about one in a thousand were teleported successfully. Considering that humans are made up of trillions and trillions of atoms, it’s unlikely that people will be beamed any time soon.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/04/2003.