Teleportation over 10 miles: the ultimate secure line [Entanglement]

We picked our jaws off the floor when we heard about tiny particles being teleported just a foot or two away, but now scientists have topped that by 10 miles. This tech won't be transporting Kirk and his Away Team to the surface of some distant planet anytime soon, but it has seriously practical applications to communications.


Quantum physics says photons can, in some ways, occupy two places at once. When one photon gets entangled with another, whatever happens to one of those particles also happens to another, even if it's TEN frickin' miles away! Now THAT's a fast connection.


The good news: The researchers were able to send this info with 89% fidelity. The bad? Information transmitted in this way will be hard to encrypt. But they're working on that. There's good reason to work on it; if they can get this right, the communication would be completely secure. Since there's no physical medium for the transmission to travel through — not even spacetime itself ૼ it would be physically impossible to jam or intercept.


[DVICE via Ars Technica via Gizmodo]