Scientists beaming at teleportation results

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter


Scientists have taken the first step towards emulating Star Trek by "teleporting" the state of an atom from one place to another without travelling between them.

The distance was modest - a mere 0.3mm. But Otago University physicist Murray Barrett, a member of the team who performed the experiment in the US, said that was "just a technicality".

"It's not like it's fundamentally limited to any distance at all," he said.

The experiment transferred the "quantum state" of electrons in the simplest metal, beryllium, from one beryllium atom to another.

The achievement, reported in the British journal Nature, is a key breakthrough on the road to producing quantum computers far far more more powerful than existing computers based on silicon chips.

It is still a long way away from teleporting complex objects such as people as in Star Trek, but the experiment involved the same principle that the state of an object - in this case the state of electrons in atoms - was destroyed in one place and recreated elsewhere.

"In Star Trek, one gets destroyed and simultaneously appears somewhere else. You never have two copies of the same thing," Dr Barrett said.

"In the same way in our experiment, the state of an atom is destroyed at one place and reappears at the other place. But in this case the atom was always there - all we have done is teleported its internal quantum state."

Previous experiments over the past decade have teleported states of light from one place to another. But Dr Barrett's team, and another in Austria who reported their results in the same issue of Nature, are the first to have teleported states of an atom.

Dr Barrett, 32, grew up in the Otago town of Milton where his father was a council labourer and his mother worked in the local woollen mill.

In a family of six boys, he was the only one who went to university.

He went to Otago University, took a doctorate at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, then worked on teleportation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.

He returned to take up a lectureship at Otago in January.