Beam me up
 |
| Transporting matter ... Dr Olsen (front) and Dr Haine |
Teleportation, a concept popularised in the original Star Trek television series, is edging closer to reality through work being conducted by theorists from The University of Queensland and Australian National University (ANU). Researchers from UQ’s Australian Research Centre for Quantum Atom Optics (Dr Ashton Bradley, Dr Simon Haine and Dr Murray Olsen) and ANU (Joseph Hope) have proposed a new way of teleporting matter waves.
“We propose a scheme which allows an atom laser beam to disappear at one location and reappear at another,” Dr Bradley said. “We feel that our scheme is closer in spirit to the original fictional concept,” Dr Haine said. “What differentiates our scheme from what is usually termed quantum teleportation is that our scheme does not require the sender and receiver to share entangled states, as there is no measurement step involved in sending the information.
“In this scheme, the sender and receiver require a reservoir of extremely cold atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).” Dr Bradley said the team would now embark on more detailed calculations, which took into account more complicated effects including the effects of the atoms colliding with each other, which could degrade the fidelity of the teleportation.
