p2pnet.net News:- Researchers have, "provided a window on the future of telecommunications by demonstrating the production, disembodiment and successful reconstruction - or teleportation - of a message to a network of participants".

What does that look like to you? Exactly.

Beam me up Scotty.

The quote comes from in-Sourced here and describes an experiment conducted by 24-year-old PhD student Andrew Lance and Dr Thomas Symul from the Quantum Optics Group in the ANU (Australian National University) Faculty of Science, in collaboration with Professor Barry Sanders from the University of Calgary in Canada.

"The research, published in the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, is expected to attract attention from defence and finance industries around the world," says in-Source. "It builds on the teleportation work conducted by Dr Warwick Bowen and Dr Ping Koy Lam at the ANU in 2002, when they teleported information using a laser beam."

In Star Trek teleportation is defined as the "disembodied' transport of an object," says the ANU's Quantum Optics Group here.

"For physicists something similar is meant except that the objects transported are extremely small particles like electrons and photons. What makes teleportation difficult, even for such small particles, is that quantum systems are so fragile that even the very act of measuring them alters their behaviour. This makes it impossible to obtain complete information of the original object. It seems then, that it must be impossible to teleport an object."

But recently, physicists discovered an idea originally suggested by Einstein in 1935 called entanglement might provicde a way around the problem.

"Entanglement of a pair of objects means that measurements on one will instantaneously change the properties of the other - no matter how far away they are," say the researchers. Einstein termed this 'spooky interactions at a distance' And the ANU quantum optics group say they've produced entanglement, "the second time this effect has been observed, after some earlier work at the California Institute of Technology".

The researchers used crystals, lenses and mirrors to produce a pair of 'entangled' laser beams that are then used to carry fragile information in the form of quantum states," says in-Source.

It doesn't, however, seem Scotty will be beaming anywhere any time soon.

"These quantum states cannot be measured or copied, making eavesdropping impossible," says in-Source, with all that implies.

"The transmission of the light beams constitutes a secret communication scheme with guaranteed security."

In the picture are Symul, Ping Koy Lam, Lance at the teleport experiment table.