Physicists beaming with teleport success

A team of physicists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second, it emerged today.

The physicists, from the Australian National University, said they had managed to disembody a laser beam in one location and rebuild it in a different spot about one metre away in the blink of an eye.

Project leader Dr Ping Koy Lam said there was a close resemblance between what his team had achieved and the movement of people in the science fiction series Star Trek, but the reality of beaming human beings between locations was still light years off.

"In theory there is nothing stopping us from doing it but the complexity of the problem is so huge that no one is thinking seriously about it at the moment," Dr Lam told a news conference.

However, he said science was not too far from being able to teleport solid matter from one location to another.

"My prediction is...it will probably be done by someone in the next three to five years, that is the teleportation of a single atom," he said. Dr Lam, who has worked on teleporting since 1997, said humans posed a "near-impossible" task because we are made up of a huge number of atoms.

The ANU breakthrough now opens up enormous possibilities for future communications systems, such as quantum computers, over the next decade.

Physicists believe quantum computers could outperform classical computers with enormous memory and the ability to solve problems infinitely faster.

Teleportation became one of the hottest topics among physicists in quantum mechanics in 1993, after the US IBM lab provided theoretical underpinning for the work. Since then about 40 laboratories globally have been experimenting in this area.

Although teams in California and Denmark were the first to do preliminary work on teleportation, the ANU team, made up of scientists from Australia, Germany, France, China and New Zealand, was the first to achieve a successful trial with 100% reliability.

ANU team member Warwick Bowen said they first successfully teleported a laser beam in May and repeated the success several times in the ensuing weeks.