Scientists teleport light to matter for 1st time

[jolinar of malkshor]

Sweet. How far do you think this will go? This tech is neat but also a little scary.

Scientists have previously been able to teleport subatomic information from similar objects such as light particles or single atoms over short distances in a split-second.

Now Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have managed to illuminate a cloud of atoms with light teleported from a half-metre away.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...rt-061005.html

[Knut]

Phase 3 is the Teleportation of me into Angelina jolie's bedroom....

[Vulcan]

Interesting how gadgets from Startrek are being invented and infiltrating society.

[Phanuthier]

This wasn't done for the first time, I think it was done last year. Maybe someone who knows more about this can confirm it, but isn't this just spintronics?

July 24 in Photonics Spectra magazine, under presstime bulletin: "Metallic slits modify laser pulses" but dy Abdulhakem Elezzabi and Anthony Dechant at UofA. You can find the full paper at the American Institute of Physics Volume 84 Number 23: Femtosecond optical pulse propagation in subwavelength metallic slits, April 2004.

This stuff I believe led to the idea of a negative refractive index, and an application the US military did that had an article referced on this board 3 months ago, the invisible blanket. The idea was that you could cover something and make it invisible by bending light around the blanket - the only problem was, since everyone else can't see you, you can't see them either.

As for light teleportation... I think MIT did that in 2002, search quantum teleportation. It was a C-60, over a long distance.

[Knut]

I think this is the next step after what they did a couple yrs ago. There they just moved a single photon several meters...

This time they were able to move several photons from one point to another and use them to illuminate matter.... what that means is the the photons were sent through in a certain organization and a couple meters away they were still in that organization. This is an important step because it shows that you can maintain organization thru the teleportation.... basically meaning that you can created information transfer that is intact at the other end.. unlike other methods were there is inevitable some data loss.... ever fibre optic cable are unable to maintain complete information transference.

[Phanuthier]

Ah, I see now. Problems in fibre optic communications over long idsstances is dispersion of light when light pulses start interferring with each other becuase of dispersive media.

I know of another place it would be useful, in optical memory. There's some interesting research in easily manipulating wavelength to store memory in light, trapping it in between mirror or something like that.