We Stopped Dreaming

Is this one step closer or something completely different?

 Taken from DiscoverMagazine.com
9: Teleportation Gets Real

by Kathy A. Svitil
From the January 2005 issue; published online January 3, 2005


The science-fiction fantasy of teleportation became reality this year, at least on the atomic scale. In independent papers published in June, groups led by experimental physicists Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria and by David Wineland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, described using laser pulses to transfer information from one atom to another in a different location. Although their methods were slightly different, the results were exactly the same: The second atom became completely indistinguishable from the first, just as if information had disappeared from one atom and appeared at the other one without traveling through the space in between.

The distances involved are slight—less than 200 micrometers—and the technique works only for information about the atoms, not the atoms themselves, making it a far cry from the images conjured up by Star Trek’s transporter. Nevertheless, quantum teleportation is a giant step toward one of physicists’ most ambitious goals: building a quantum computer—an ultrafast, supersecure, huge-memory number-crunching device that uses atomic particles instead of transistors to retain and process information.