Beam Me Up, Scotty?
1 min readA Scotty-type beaming up of someone is a long ways off yet, but in today’s world, Chinese scientists have teleported photons from a ground station in Ngari (Tibet) to China’s Micius satellite, orbiting three hundred miles above the earth.
The teleportation has set a new record for quantum teleportation in which the “complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another – in effect teleporting it to a distant location.”
“Space-scale teleportation can be realized and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum internet,” said the authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China, in a paper detailing the event.
“This palpably indicates that the field isn’t limited to scientists sitting in their labs thinking about weird things,” said Ian Walmsley, Hooke professor of experimental physics at Oxford University. “Quantum phenomena actually have a utility and can really deliver some significant new technologies.”