Boffins claim teleportation breakthrough

A team of Australian boffins is claiming a dramatic breakthrough in 'teleporting', the process by which objects can be disassembled and recreated perfectly at another location.

Beating competition from Europe and the US, an Australian National University team led by 34 year-old physicist Dr Ping Koy Lam claims to have successfully and consistently teleported a message-encoded laser beam along a metre-long optical communications system.

According to reports in The Australian newspaper, Dr Lam and his team used a process known as 'quantum entanglement', where a radio signal is encoded and embedded on an input laser.

The laser is combined with entanglement and then scanned, and is destroyed in the process. The radio signal survives and is sent electronically to another base station where the code is deciphered and reassembled.

"What we have demonstrated here is that we can take billions of photons, destroy them simultaneously, and then recreate them in another place," Dr Lam told The Australian.

Dr Lam added that, although teleporting of objects and humans was "very, very far away" due to the sheer number of atoms involved, quantum entanglement did offer the chance for more secure communications and could speed up computing.

"The applications of teleportation for computers and communications over the next decade are very exciting," he concluded.