[Flipside]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40133/

This has been achieved with Photon clouds etc previously, but they just managed it with Atoms. The downside is, it's incredibly unreliable (basically one in 100 million attempts actually succeed), but still, an interesting development.

[Herra Tohtori]

“Somehow you have to send it [information] from one point to another without ever having read it.”

Isn't that what governments and parliaments do when it comes to preparing and passing laws...?


Anyway, sounds rather coolsome. I expect it to spark up the old question about whether it is "teleportation" to transfer the quantum state of an atom and implant it to another atom, or is moving the original atom required...

[Flipside]

Personally, I'd say Electron Cloning would be a far better name for it Especially considering you have to actually 'destroy' the state of the original atom in order to only have one left.

[ssmit132]

To read the quantum information contained in an atom or a photon, scientists must measure some property of that particle. But in the quantum world, the act of measuring a particle alters it. Until it’s measured, an atom or photon can remain in an ambiguous state of all possible values simultaneously. Whenever a particle is measured, though, this range of possibilities “collapses” into a single, distinct value. The original, uncommitted state is lost, and it’s this ability to hold multiple values at once that gives qubits such potential for high-performance computing.

I don't really understand that. Do they mean essentially that the particle can be any value until they measure it?

[Flipside]

That's, in a way, the core of Quantum physics, Schroedinger's 'cat in a box' scenario.

I always get visions of a scene from Star Trek:

'Mr Spock, was the Transport successful? Did we get him?'

'......Maybe'