Teleportation of photons has already become a reality.
"Bennett and his colleagues had to wait four years to see their predictions verified. In 1997, in a small room at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, a group of physicists led by Anton Zeilinger performed the first teleportation experiment. Zeilinger's travelers were photons and he was sending them only a meter or so, from one side of the lab to the other. Today, more than three years later, Zeilinger is working on the next step, which is to teleport photons over distances of a kilometer.
Soon after Zeilinger's breakthrough, Cirac and Zoller proposed that teleportation could become the basis of a kind of quantum Internet. And in March of 2000, Seth Lloyd and Selim Shahriar at MIT and Philip Hemmer at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, in Lincoln, Mass., suggested sending entangled photons over optical fibers to nodes containing cold atoms that would absorb the photons and so store the entanglement. This entanglement could then be used for error correction, teleportation, and various other valuable applications. A number of groups are working on this idea, including Jeff Kimble at the California Institute of Technology and Eli Yablonovitch at the University of California at Los Angeles. They hope to have a three-node network running within 10 years." |
