'Beam me up Scotty, this planet sucks'

Science fiction continues to inspire 'science fact'

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - While the "beaming" of humans, a la Star Trek, is still science fiction, scientists have successfully teleported information from one point to another.

Professor Eugene Polzik and group of Danish researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) believe they have taken a significant step in the quest to develop the future of communication, communication on a quantum level.

In principle, the experiment created a quantum-powered network which transferred data from point A to point B through teleportation. Think of it as a tiny cell phone receiving information from a cell tower, but instead of using radio waves, it uses light to carry the signal.

The experiment places a piece of information at point A, and an atomic object (made up of billions of atoms) which sits inside an isolated glass container filled with a cesium gas about one meter apart.

The information is transmitted, using rays of light, through the glass and is stored in the atomic object. The physics behind this is complex, but the result is that the information could be reclaimed from the atomic object, interpreted and used in real world applications.

Quantum physics deals with the smallest known parts used to make up everything.

Polzik says that, unlike current digital communication which encodes information in to a string of 1s and 0s, the data in quantum communication can be far more complex.

It is possible, sometime in the future, that we may not be e-mailing photos to friends and family, but beam-mailing them instead.