By Peter Weiss
While not actually teleporting matter from place to place as in Star Trek, physicists have now plucked a quantum property from one atom and transmitted it to another. That feat of quantum teleportation, reported independently by teams in Austria and the United States in the June 17 Nature, moves scientists nearer to building a class of so-called quantum computers that’s expected to be astonishingly speedy at certain tasks, such as scouring databases for specific information.
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The new achievements “represent a magnificent confluence of experimental advances,” H. Jeff Kimble of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and Steven J. van Enk of Bell Labs’ Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J., say in a commentary in the same issue.