Recently the journal Science, in their Jan. 23rd issue, reported they had achieved the “teleportation of quantum information between atomic quantum memories separated by about 1 meter.” What does all that mean- Information was transmitted between two separate, entangled atoms at the speed of light. It doesn’t mean we’ll have a “beam me up Scotty” moment anytime soon. But it bodes very well for the possibility of light speed, secure internet within the not to distant future. And who knows, maybe we’ll figure out how those crazy yogis appear two places at once. That’s all I’ve got, the experts at e! Science News say:

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance. That capability is necessary for workable quantum information systems because they will require memory storage at both the sending and receiving ends of the transmission.

In the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Science, the scientists report that, by using their protocol, atom-to-atom teleported information can be recovered with perfect accuracy about 90% of the time – and that figure can be improved. Read on…