Danish scientists achieve advanced quantum teleportation

As you can imagine, here at Engadget, we love it when science fiction becomes more science and less fiction. With that in mind, we're pleased to pass along the news that Danish scientists at Copenhagen University have made a breakthrough in the wacky world of quantum teleportation by transporting quantum information over a distance of half a meter (1.6 feet). In order to achieve this, Dr. Eugene Polzik and his team shined a strong laser beam into a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms that shared the same directional spin. As Scientific American reports: "The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud." (It should be noted that this process is more akin to duplication than actual teleportation, i.e. using this method on a human being would result in the formation of a doppelganger and not a magical Star Trek-like movement of matter). To achieve this goal, Polzik and other scientists added a second weaker laser pulse and split the two beams into separate branches in order to measure the difference between the quantum phases; through that measurement the scientists were then able to transfer the information of the spin state of the weak laser to the combination of the cesium atoms and the strong laser, without disturbing the quantum entanglement between the laser and the cesium. Umm, so the short of it is: one small step for a cesium atom, but one giant leap for quantum computing research and the advancement of teleportation theory.

[Thanks, Josh H. and Eric M.]

Read - Reuters
Read - Scientific American

[Vincent_Y79 @ Oct 5th 2006 11:30AM]

I'll settle for a replicator anyday since this doesn't really teleport.

[chris @ Oct 5th 2006 11:52AM]

im no scientist genius but why didn't they replicate gold or something worthwhile replicating?!

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 5th 2006 11:43AM]

Dominos Pizza has purchased initial rights to this technology.

MMMM, free teleported chocolate pizza crust.

[Chace @ Oct 5th 2006 11:55AM]

^ test man....its just a test. Why waste a piece of gold on something that might not work??

[Eli @ Oct 5th 2006 12:14PM]

I hate how they always call this teleportation to get the masses all excited. It's just quantum entanglement, nothing is being teleported here unless you consider sending information over distances teleportation. This isn't going to get you instant pizza delivery.

[Adam @ Oct 5th 2006 12:58PM]

Yeah, this is more subspace communications than teleportation...

[scarecrow @ Jan 7th 2007 10:17PM]

I love how they call this teleportation, because, from a macro perspective, the point that this is simply distributing information, is overly literal and obtuse.

If I could step into a phone booth in DC and step out in Paris I can't I would care whether it was matter or information which was transported. Identity, in this regard, is nothing more than information about the local makeup and configuration of your constituent particles.

I no more worry that it is information being sent than I worry that the $100 I deposited in my account via ATM last week is different from the $100 I pulled from my account yesterday.

[Eli @ Oct 5th 2006 1:20PM]

Well no this won't break the light speed barrier, although it's very secure it doesn't work too well over long distances yet. =)

[Baby-G @ Oct 5th 2006 12:27PM]

teleport my fist into your face...

[Ian Jardine @ Oct 5th 2006 12:36PM]

Next comes retro causality......

[PEZ @ Oct 5th 2006 12:43PM]

They're talking about SILLY speeds for data. THis might be our 25G network protocol :-P

[disciple83 @ Oct 5th 2006 12:47PM]

Baby-G is a student of "your nuts to my foot" style of combat.

Isn't Cesium a liquid at room temperature? How did they get it to a gaseous state while maintaining room temperature? Evaporation seems kind of impossible for an alkali doesn't it?

Besides, Cesium is the red-headed stepchild of the metals, it gets pissy over anything, that's why they used it. Eventually, they'll get around to using lead.

[Adam @ Oct 5th 2006 12:58PM]

Low Density

[startrekguy @ Oct 5th 2006 12:53PM]

Actually, the duplication concept is somewhat consistent with Star Trek�s teleportation fiction where matter is transferred to energy form/data and then is replicated somewhere else. There�s even an episode in ST:TNG where Commander Riker was duplicated into 2 separate persons in an accident.

[markm @ Oct 5th 2006 1:15PM]

Yeah, this is more of a Quantum Fax Machine and not so much of a teleporter.

[jron @ Oct 5th 2006 1:22PM]

I could boil water at room temperature, given the right pressure.

[mike @ Oct 5th 2006 1:22PM]

If they ever came out with teleportation, I would never go in one. Transfering matter to energy/data and then recompliing it into its form is essentialy killing you, but creating your clone on the other side. so while your clone and everyone else would think the teleportation is a success, you would in fact be dead.

I can only see teleportation in the way future (if its ever acheieved) as a use to teleport objects and not living things from one place to another. So basically, Instant pizza delivery in the end :p

[Hutcho @ Oct 5th 2006 1:36PM]

If you could reproduce matter into any object then why would you bother transporting it!! You would just create it with the enery->matter converter.
Instant Pizza delivery? Go watch another episode of Futurama, hey has Fry ever actually delivered a pizza in that show anyway?

[JC @ Oct 5th 2006 1:30PM]

If Spaceballs has taught us anything, it's that teleporters always malfunction, and you end up with your head on backwards wondering why your ass is so big.

[Kevin @ Oct 5th 2006 1:32PM]

Teleportation doesn't mean the same thing in actual scientific usage as it does in fantasy settings like Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons (both about equal as far as their scientific accuracy goes). Teleportation refers strictly to the transfer of information between one atoms. It's not moving anything from one place to the other, and it's not creating a new atom, all it's doing is, essentially, copying information. So don't get your hopes up about being able to beam yourself to work when you miss the bus, or replicating a pizza when you don't feel like cooking.

[Heisenberg's ghost @ Oct 5th 2006 1:54PM]

"Polzik and other scientists added a second weaker laser pulse and split the two beams into separate branches in order to measure the difference between the quantum phases"

Wait, didn't they change the outcome by measuring the difference? Uncertainty principle, anyone?

[Tracy L @ Oct 5th 2006 2:47PM]

If I was half the geek I used to be then I could tell you which ST:TOS episode that picture came from!

And as I remember the ST folklore, there was a discussion/argument that the "transporter" actually did destroy the original and just make a copy in another place. Many episodes suggested this!

[RedBull Runner @ Oct 5th 2006 2:57PM]

"Instant Pizza delivery? Go watch another episode of Futurama, hey has Fry ever actually delivered a pizza in that show anyway?"

Actually, yes he has, if you watch the first episode, he delivers a pizza to some suspened animation place on new years eve in the year 1999. where he finds out the pizza was a fake call and he sits down at a desk infront of a pod thing, and he leans back in his chair and falls back and gets stuck in the pod, freezing him for 1000 years, where he then unfreezes and thats how he ends up in the year 3000


oh, and btw...

I, For one, welcome the freaky deaky danish teleporting overlords...

[telepheedian @ Oct 5th 2006 2:59PM]

To achieve teleportation, simply perform the operation and have somebody kill you on the beginning end.

[teodoro @ Oct 5th 2006 3:00PM]

Yep. If you measure a quantum particle it ceases to have the same spin rate or direction that it had before. That's quantum entaglement 101, so they must have been doing something else to perceive the state change.

[Godfather @ Oct 5th 2006 5:18PM]

If a human were to "teleport" somewhere using this, or something like it, and when their doppelganger came out the other end, a perfect replica of their original self, would the doppelganger even notice that it wasn't the original until it saw itself? And if the answer is no, and if the original were destroyed after "teleportation," would this not be, for all intensive purposes, teleportation of a human?

[grimace @ Oct 5th 2006 5:21PM]

Fry also delivers a pizza in the mcneilson episode (god i love back2back futurama on adult swim)

[makingmark @ Oct 5th 2006 6:50PM]

Godfather is right on. Star Trek teleportation transported matter? Says who? That was just our assumption. Teleportation through transfer of data with destruction of original matter followed by replication with new matter is teleportation. All we need is a suitable scanning & assembly capability.

[Nathan @ Oct 5th 2006 8:19PM]

I wonder how this project has the money to duplicate things? If only they had a way to make money.

[Clayton @ Oct 5th 2006 8:31PM]

Not sure where the 'doppelganger' concept came from, but quantum teleportation (which has been achieved before, btw) actually does NOT duplicate - it may sound like it does from the description, but the process of entanglement destroys the initial information about the original particles.

[John Sununu @ Oct 5th 2006 11:25PM]

If it doesn't break the speed of light, i.e. if it's not instant, it's not quantum entanglement, but merely quantum state replication. Whatever.

[Mtheumer @ Oct 5th 2006 11:42PM]

What most may not know is that on Trek, imaging scanners, similar to this technology are used to map the quantum structure of an object. Once the object is scanned, it's subatomic bonds are broken, held in a pattern buffer that prevents the particles from randomly reforming. Finally the mass of subatomic particles are reassembled at the target location based on the data from the original scan.

[Murc @ Oct 6th 2006 12:19AM]

teleportation will never happen. Once the technology for this is possable...it will be banned, and deemed "illegal".

Why? Because if you can teleport someone or something, then that means your can digitaly "store" them (like be a bunch of hard drives), and then send that person to somewhere else, and then they would appear, the problem is that it would be VERY easy to make copies...so people would copy themselves, and there cars or paychecks...theres just to many things that would be messup up if this tech is possible.

Not like I care...My bones will be dust in the grave by the times this tech matures.

[Dan @ Oct 20th 2006 12:26AM]

I think they'd find some way that's simpler than inventing teleportation to trace and control that kind of use. Like logs and ID and w/e else is necessary, though it'd be costly and might take a lot more work, etc. u know?

[Derick @ Oct 8th 2006 4:21PM]

Now go read 'Think Like a Dinosaur' by James Patrick Kelly.

[Dan @ Oct 20th 2006 12:26AM]

I'm not in the best understanding, so I just want to be sure...

Does this seem to, in some way, contradict the "matter can neither be created or destroyed" law if you could have a 'doppelganger' or copy of anything?

[JD @ Nov 6th 2006 1:27PM]

Dan: Then somebody would just create a modchip. Solder that sucker to the TSOP, load a modded BIOS, and you could create your own copies of people. In order to transport these clones outside of the secure network without your modchip being detected, they might need to create a spoofed network - something like a KiaKlone network or something :/

[Lang @ Oct 28th 2006 7:51AM]

And if they do replicate gold that will go towards destroying the world economy. Gold is valuable because of it's scarcity. If you flood the market with replicated gold, there goes the economy. We'll have to come up with somthing else to replace it with.