Quantum networks leap over paradigm shifts

DANISH BOFFINETTES and boffins have worked out a way of teleporting data over short distances in a split second, it's claimed.

According to the popular science tabloid Nature, Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University have managed to shift the data by transferring it from light to matter.

This means that light can be used to carry the information, and matter can be used to store it. An experiment involved a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms.

So far they have teleported the data half a metre but believe it can be extended further. This is probably just as well as it is being touted as the first stage towards quantum networking.

Hard to see how that can take off the ground when you need a box every 500 centimetres. Still it is an advance on early experiments where the data could be teleported only sub-atomic distances.

More here. µ