Published in Physics World, 21 May 2012
Physicists in China claim to have teleported the quantum states of photons nearly 100 km in free space, breaking the previous record by a factor of 100. The development could pave the way for satellite-based quantum communication, or fundamental tests of quantum mechanics over long distances.
Quantum teleportation is a way of transferring a quantum state from one place to another without actually sending a particle in that state through space. In the normal arrangement, two people, Alice and Bob, each take one half of a pair of entangled particles and then go their separate ways. Whenever Alice wants to send a quantum state to Bob, she allows a third particle in that state to interact with her half of the entangled pair of particles. […]
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