News: Beam me up, Aussie
Science by Email - 21 June, 2002
a CSIRO Education service. For more information please see http://www.csiro.au/sciencemail
A team of physicists at the Australian National University have boldly done what no one has done before: they have built a teleporter.
Teleportation means that something starts at one spot, vanishes and reappears somewhere else. The most famous example of teleportation in fiction is probably the transporters on Star Trek. Now, a team of scientists at the Australian National University in Canberra have built a device that can teleport a laser beam more than a meter.
It works by using a bizarre effect from quantum physics. When two particles, like electrons, interact, there is a sort of connection formed between them. After they have interacted, something that happens to one particle can affect the other one, even if there's a great distance between them. This is called quantum entanglement. Albert Einstein refered to it as "spooky action at a distance."
The team at the ANU used entangled particles to destroy a laser beam at one spot and recreate it perfectly at another spot, almost a metre away. The recreated laser beam is identical to the original. Although other scientists have managed to teleport individual photons (particles of light) before, the ANU team are the first to be able to reliably teleport anything larger - in this case, the huge number of photons making up the laser beam.
So far, nobody has been able to teleport atoms, although it may not be long before someone manages it. The leader of the ANU team, Dr Ping Koy Lam, expects someone will do it within the next five years. Don't expect to be teleporting anywhere for your holidays, though. The human body contains so many atoms (roughly 1 followed by 27 zeroes) that there is no way we will be able to teleport a human using any technology in the foreseeable future.
Although we won't be teleporting people, there should still be lots of uses for teleportation. It could help develop unbreakable secret codes that could help banking and commerce on the internet. In the longer term, it could be used in computers to make them up to a million times faster than current ones.
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The Australian National University.
Public Affairs Division, media releases
http://www.anu.edu.au/pad/media/releases/2002/teleportation.htm
TELEPORTATION FIRST
Canberra, Monday 17 June 2002
Teleportation - the disembodiment of an object in one location and reconstruction in a different location in a split second - has been successfully carried out in a physics lab in Australia.
Leading Physicist Dr Ping Koy Lam, 34, and a team of researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra have teleported a laser beam.
The achievement confirms in practice the theory that teleportation is possible. It also means that, in theory, it is possible to teleport solid objects. However, a laser beam is the only thing that can be teleported at this stage. The announcement was made at ANU today.
Teleportation is one of the hottest topics among physicists working in quantum mechanics. Some 40 labs around the world are currently trying to teleport a laser beam, but have not yet succeeded. This phenomenon was observed by one lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) but the ANU experiment extends the previous results and shows greater reliability.
The results of Australia's teleportation project will be presented at an international conference on quantum electronics in Moscow next week.
Teleportation has major applications in quantum computing, cryptography and communications. It has the potential to:
· Enable quantum computers to operate and solve problems millions of times faster than current computers
· Make encrypted - or coded - information 100% secure, currently impossible. This would be vital to the finance, banking and defence industries
· Increase dramatically the speed and quantity of information transferred in fibre optic communications.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) has provided Dr Lam with about $2 million in funding since 1998. This includes a $1.1 million Discovery grant from the ARC in January 2002. The ANU also provided extensive support, including infrastructure and a pool of talented researchers and students.
The teleportation program is led by Dr Lam along with Prof. Hans Bachor and Dr Timothy Ralph. This Australian program included scientists from Germany, France, Denmark, China and New Zealand.
The Federal Minister for Science, Peter McGauran, congratulated Dr Lam and the team on an outstanding achievement. "Your work establishes Australia and The Australian National University as the world leader in this frontier science. Its application has exciting potential for major economic and social benefits for all Australians."
The CEO of the Australian Research Council Professor Vicki Sara said: "This achievement enhances Australia's status as a centre of world-leading research. It has the potential to provide significant economic and social benefits and highlights the importance of basic research to Australia's competitiveness in the global knowledge economy."
Media enquiries: ANU Genevieve Turville 02 6125 6125 or 0416 249 245
ARC Michael Smith 0402 011 503.
No 67/2002
© 2001 Public Affairs Division,
The Australian National University.
Last Modified January 2001
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Beam Me Up! ; Australian Scientists Teleport a Beam of Light
By Belinda Goldsmith
abc News.com; Reuters
Abridged, full text at <http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/teleport020617.html
... Lam, [the team leader] has worked on teleporting since 1997.
Although teams in California and Denmark were the first to do preliminary work on teleportation, the ANU team of scientists from Australia, Germany, France, China and New Zealand was the first to achieve a successful trial with 100 percent reliability.
How It’s Done
The idea is if quantum particles like electrons, ions, and atoms have the same properties, they are essentially the same.
So if the properties of quantum particles making up an object are reproduced in another particle group, there would be a precise duplication of the object, so only information about the particles' properties need be transmitted, not the particles.
The inability to pass the information reliably has been a major stumbling block in past "entanglement" experiments.
ANU team member Warwick Bowen said they first successfully teleported a laser beam on May 23 to their great surprise, and repeated the success time after time in following weeks using their small-car-sized transporter, ironing out certain glitches.
"Even in Star Trek they realize there are problems with teleportation," Bowen told the news conference.
"It is such a complicated experiment that nobody knows whether their particular set-up is going to work until you do it ...and it turns out our system is very good."
Copyright 2002 Reuters.
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BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2049000/2049048.stm
Australian teleport breakthrough
Monday, 17 June, 2002, 07:11 GMT 08:11 UK
The research could feed into better telecomunications
By Dr David WhitehouseBBC News Online science editor
It is a long way from Star Trek, but teleportation - the disembodiment of an object in one location and its reconstruction in another - has been successfully carried out in a physics lab in Australia.
Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) made a beam of light disappear in one place and reappear in another a short distance away.
The achievement confirms that in theory teleportation is possible, at least for sub-atomic particles; whether it can be done for larger systems, such as atoms, remains to be seen.
The more likely applications will come in telecommunications, enabling much faster transfer of data and the use of encryption that can never be broken.
Teleportation has been one of the hottest topics among physicists working in quantum mechanics - the study of the fundamental structure of matter.
Some 40 labs around the world are currently trying to teleport a laser beam after pioneering work in 1998 at the California Institute of Technology showed it should be possible.
'Spooky interaction'
The Australian researchers have exploited a phenomenon called "quantum entanglement", which links the properties of two photons of light created at the same time. Einstein called it a "spooky interaction".
What it means is that two photons can be created and sent to different places. It is possible to force one photon into a specific quantum mechanical state and, because the two photons are connected in some way, the other photon will instantaneously take up a complementary state.
At first sight, entanglement offers the prospect of sending a signal faster than the speed of light. But a closer look at what is actually possible shows that this will not work because of the limits of what can be known about quantum mechanical systems and how such information is relayed.
But it may offer the prospect of a Star Trek-style transporter.
'Exciting applications'
Using quantum entanglement, ANU physicist Ping Koy Lam has disassembled laser light at one end of an optical communications system and recreated a replica just a metre away.
An encoded signal is embedded in an input stream of photons, which is entangled with another beam.
Elsewhere in the lab, the beam of photons and the associated signal is reconstituted.
"What we have demonstrated here is that we can take billions of photons, destroy them simultaneously, and then recreate them in another place," Dr Lam says.
"The applications of teleportation for computers and communications over the next decade are very exciting," he adds.
Body movement
Quantum teleportation could make encrypted or coded information 100% secure, Dr Lam said, because even if intercepted the message would be unintelligible unless it was intended for a specific recipient.
"It should be possible to construct a perfect cryptography system. When two parties want to communicate with one another, we can enable the secrecy of the communication to be absolutely perfect."
But for a human to be teleported, a machine would have to be built that could pinpoint and analyse the trillions and trillions of atoms that make up the human body.
"I think teleporting of that kind is very, very far away," Dr Lam says. "We don't know how to do that with a single atom yet."
Quantum teleporting is problematic for humans because the original is destroyed in the process of creating the replica.
© BBC MMII
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BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2050000/2050210.stm
Monday, 17 June, 2002, 15:46 GMT 16:46 UK
Q&A: Teleportation
Australian researchers say they have been able to teleport the light from a laser from one part of a laboratory to another. BBC News Online Science Editor, Dr David Whitehouse, answers some basic questions about teleportation.
Moving beams of light around sounds like a clever trick, is it relevant to me?
The ultra-fast computers of the future will be based on beams of light that exploit the strange properties of the sub-atomic or quantum mechanical world. Using light and quantum mechanics offers the prospect of computers trillions of times more powerful than we have today. The first, tentative but encouraging, steps have been made towards primitive quantum computers.
Will we ever be able to move solid objects around?
Highly unlikely. It seems we can move photons of light around and photons do not weigh anything. Perhaps in a few years, we could teleport a single atom. Some researchers believe that we may be able to teleport a virus but they will not say when.
I've seen stuff like this on Star Trek? How would a Star Trek transporter work in real life?
The idea is that a human body is broken down into information and transmitted in some way to another place where that information is used to rebuild the human. Personally, I would take the train.
OK, crystal ball time - at the end of this century, how far could things have advanced?
It is always difficult to speculate about the future. But that will not stop me. We may be able to teleport a molecule, perhaps a few tens of atoms. That would be a great scientific achievement but not a useful matter transporter.
And will we ever transport a human?
To teleport a human would require knowledge of the type and exact position and movement of every atom of the person to be teleported. That is about a hundred thousand million million million million atoms. To send that information down today's fast data transfer systems would take a hundred million times longer than the present age of the Universe (which is about 15 thousand million years).
If it is ever possible, there is the question of whether destroying a human to teleport their information to another place to rebuild them again would constitute murder, and you might also want to discuss if the teleported human would actually be the original person or a copy.
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Have Your Say
Sure I would get in a transporter. Hang on, what if a fly is teleported with you?
Richard, UK
Seems to me, if a transporter were ever built like the ones on StarTrek, they would be able to scan every tiny detail down to the atomic level, and and then transmit that data to another like terminal that could then reconstruct all that info in to an exact duplicate. Transport the original, not likely, but transport an exact copy, sure, why not?
William R. Vire, US
Anyone wanting to use a teleport initially would have to get over the major hurdle of fearing death. To their friends on the receiving end of the it they would be saying: "Wow! It worked after all". Their fear, now a copy from the original, would subside with more and more uses of it. Even looking at it logically like that, I would have a hard time persuading myself to use it.
Paul Smith, UK
There is more to life than just the physical form. I'm not talking about a soul, though many will want to. I'm talking about the difference between a living being and a dead one. Im also talking about the billions of billions of electrical processes in the brain, and also the information that gets sent around a living being, the nervous system. Can that information be preserved? And sent? And Reconstructed? If a person were reciting a poem in their head at the moment of "teleportation", would their thoughts continue at the point they left off when their body is reconstructed?
Morgan, New Zealand
For years men have considered various ways to eliminate the troublesome burden of a mother-in-law. It seems we are on the verge of a solution. Teleport her. If it takes thousands of years, so what? If she is not the same when reassembled, then perhaps all the better.
Bob Baumann, New York City, US