'Quantum teleportation' beams information farther than ever before Scientists managed to send data across an 89-mile span,

and the next step will b e to send data between Earth and orbiting satellites. By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Thu, Sep 06 2012 at 9:24 AM Physicists have "teleported" quantum information farther than ever in a new stu dy reported on Sept. 5. This kind of teleportation isn't quite what Scotty was "beaming up" on televisio n's Star Trek, but it does represent a kind of magic of its own. While Star Trek 's teleporters transport people from place to place instantaneously, quantum tel eportation sends information. A team of scientists from Austria, Canada and Germany have now beamed the quantu m state of a particle of light from one island to another 89 miles (143 kilomete rs) away. "One can actually transfer the quantum states of a particle in our case a photon from one location to another location without physically transferring this phot on itself," explained physicist Xiaosong Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. To do this, the researchers started out with three particles: one particle to be teleported, and two "entangled" particles. Entanglement is one of the most biza rre implications of the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the physics o f tiny particles. When two particles are entangled, they become connected in suc h a way that, even if separated over vast distances, an action performed on one affects the other. In the recent experiment, all three photons started out on the island of La Palm a, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. One of the entangled photon s was then sent through the air 89 miles to the Canary Island of Tenerife. Since the particles were entangled, when a measurement was made of the quantum states of the two particles on La Palma, it affected the particle on Tenerife, too, al lowing the first particle to essentially be recreated in a new location without traversing the distance. [Stunning Photos of the Very Small] This achievement beat the previous quantum teleportation distance record of 60 m iles (97 km), set by a Chinese research group just months ago. It represents a s ignificant step toward establishing a "quantum internet" that could allow messag es to be sent more securely, and calculations to be completed more quickly, scie ntists say. "The quantum internet is predicted to be the next-generation information process ing platform, promising secure communication and an exponential speed-up in dist ributed computation," the researchers write in a paper detailing their experimen t published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. The next step will be to establish quantum teleportation between Earth and orbit ing satellites. "The future goal of our research work will be to do such experiments on the sate llite level," Ma told LiveScience. "This will enable intercontinental quantum in formation exchange."