Scientists Report 'Teleported' Data 

By Peter O'Connor
Yahoo! News
Associated Press Writer 
Mon Jun 17, 2002

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australian scientists said Monday 
they had successfully "teleported" a laser beam encoded with 
data, breaking it up and reconstructing an exact replica a 
yard away.

Their work replicates an experiment at the California Institute 
of Technology in 1998, but the Australian team believes their 
technique is more reliable and consistent.

Although the research brings to mind the way "Star Trek" 
characters were beamed around on TV and in film, scientists at 
the Australian National University said their technique's main 
use will be as a way to encrypt information and for a new 
generation of super-fast computers.

At this stage, the process perfected by Australian physicist 
Ping Koy Lam and his 12-member team can only teleport light by 
destroying the light beam and creating an exact copy at the 
receiving end from light particles known as photons.

"We have taken a beam of laser light ... and completely destroyed 
it and then made measurements of the destroyed laser beam and 
then took the measured results to the other side of the lab and 
reconstructed an exact replica of what we have destroyed," 
said Lam.

Teleporting a laser beam involves destroying and replicating
billions of photons.

Lam said he believes the process, called "quantum teleportation" 
and which takes a nanosecond - one billionth of one second - 
will soon be used for teleporting matter.

"My prediction is if we are not doing it, it will probably be 
done by someone in the next three to five years, that is the 
teleportation of a single atom or a small group of atoms," 
he said.

Teleporting a living person would likely be virtually impossible,
scientists said.

"In theory, there is nothing stopping, us but the complexity of 
the problem is so huge no one is thinking seriously about it at 
the moment," Lam said.

Quantum teleportation makes use of a strange aspect of quantum
physics called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says
it is impossible to measure both the speed and position of an 
object at the same time.

The researchers couldn't directly measure the key characteristics 
of the laser beam they wanted to replicate, so they turned to a 
process called entanglement. In entanglement, characteristics 
of tiny particles - like the photons that make up laser beams - 
can be mirrored in a second set of particles.

So researchers can make their measurements on a second laser 
beam that was entangled with the first. The measurements are 
then sent by radio waves to the receiving station, which 
exactly replicates the first beam that was destroyed in the 
process of entanglement.

Lam's team will be presenting the results to an international
conference on quantum electronics in Moscow next week.