QUANTUM DATA transfer has taken another sizable jump forward, after scientists managed to 'teleport' data from one proton to another 63 miles away.
Despite being, at this stage, of naff-all practical use, the achievement is a massive one because usually in these situations, the data would have got lost almost straight away.
The scientists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have fixed this with a new type of light detector.
If this could be translated into hundreds or even thousands of miles, then the technology could be used to send data in quantities and at speeds that would open up possibilities for data processing, encryption and communication that were previously unimaginable.
NIST describes two ideas as "unbreakable encryption" and "advanced code breaking". The two are surely mutually exclusive, but you get the general idea.
"Only about 1 percent of photons make it all the way through 100km of fiber,' NIST’s Marty Stevens says. "We never could have done this experiment without these new detectors, which can measure this incredibly weak signal."
What this new technique does offer is the possibility of creating quantum repeaters, which would create staging posts to pass along and strengthen the data, like a more effective version of Chinese whispers - each time taking that dying light ember and recreating it at full strength. It's a beautiful thing.
In any case, this experiment saw 83 percent of data reach its desired location within the time parameters of the experiment, compared with a 25 percent using previous technology.
The fragility of quantum information is proving a stumbling block to what has the potential to be the biggest game-changer in computing, albeit decades away. Groups such as NASA and Google have been working with quantum computing for years, often with questionable results.
It is worth noting that the premise of "teleporting" has no relation to the concepts described in science fiction, but rather refers to the transportation and reconstruction of information held in quantum states. The data to transfer a human being is impossibly large, so don't expect an alternative to the bus anytime soon despite what we said in 2007. µ
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