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Physics News Update
Number 356 (Story #3), January 27, 1998 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

ANOTHER VERSION OF QUANTUM TELEPORTATION is being published by researchers in Italy and England (Francesco DeMartini, University of Rome, demartini@axcasp.caspur.it). Like the Innsbruck teleportation scheme published several weeks earlier (Update 350), this demonstration employs a pair of entangled photons. Whereas the Innsbruck experiment teleported the polarization value of a third, distinct "message photon" to one of the entangled photons, the Rome scheme encodes one of the entangled photons with a specific polarization state and transmits this state to the other entangled photon. Although different from the Innsbruck experiment (which had a 25% teleportation success rate) and the original theoretical proposal for teleportation, this scheme works 100% of the time if the receiver applies the right transformations on the second photon. (D. Boschi et al., upcoming article in Physical Review Letters). In another, theoretical paper, Sam Braunstein of the University of Wales (Bangor) and Jeff Kimble of Caltech propose an experimental method for extending quantum teleportation from transmitting discrete variables such as polarization to transmitting continuous variables like the amplitude of the electric field associated with a light wave. (Braunstein et al., Physical Review Letters, 26 January 1998.)