Archives

SYDNEY, Monday (AFP)

An Australian research team claimed Monday to have successfully "teleported" a message-encoded laser beam of light in a world first breakthrough that turns science fiction into reality.

Using a process known as "quantum entanglement", the team, from Canberra's Australian National University (ANU), dissembled a laser at one end of an optical communications system and recreated a replica a metre away.

Although the distance was tiny, the team leader Chinese Australian physicist Ping Koy Lam said the technology was the same as that used in the the sci-fi series "Star Trek" aboard the starship Enterprise.

Teleportation is the disembodiment of an object in one location and its immediate reconstruction in another location - "beam me up, Scotty."

"However, there are some differences," Lam said Monday. "We cannot teleport matter yet so all we have done is that we have teleported photons within a beam of laser."

The most likely application of the process in the short term is dramatically improved communication systems and the creation of a new generation of computers with enormously improved speed - up to a billion times faster than the fastest computer currently available.

Lam told ABC radio his team had made a measurement of the laser beam by destroying it and then sending the measured result and sent it from one part of the laboratory to another part of the laboratory where an exact replica was reconstructed.

The ANU team has won a global race with researchers in the United States and Europe to reliably and consistently transmit a laser beam although a US team pioneered teletransportation with small particles of light known as "photons" in 1997. The research, partly funded by the Australian Research Council, was unveiled by The Australian newspaper which reported that the process involved an encoded radio signal which was embodied on an input laser.

The laser was combined with quantum entanglement and then scanned and destroyed in the process.

But the radio signal survived and was sent electronically to a receiving station where within a nanosecond an exact replica of the beam with radio signal intact was retrieved and decoded.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager