Thanks to Deanna Hoak for spotting this one. Physicists in Denmark have apparently succeeded in producing quantum entanglement on a macro level – involving trillions of atoms according to this report. There’s not a lot of information available as yet because Prof. Polzik and his team have announced their work through a letter to the editor of Nature. There is, as yet, no official paper as far as I can see. The letter itself is available through Nature’s web site, but only if you pay $30 for it, so I’m going to go look for an old-fashioned paper edition instead. In the meantime I’ll see if I can get in touch with Oliver Morton.

Update: Here’s Scientific American’s take on the experiment.

Update 2: The Nature podcast has an interview with Professor Polzik that sheds some more light on the subject (and includes the usual Star Trek jokes). One thing to note is that the current techniques for quantum teleportation, while they can transfer large amount of information instantaneously over a long distance, do require a classical (i.e. non-quantum) signal connecting the two sites. The SFnal goal of FtL Communication is therefore ruled out, at least for now.

The Polzik interview is, of course, the last item on the podcast, but there’s other interesting stuff in it too. I was interested to learn, for example, that lions can count, although I think we should all have known that the mammal with the most powerful bite is the Tasmanian Devil. How long the podcast will be available is uncertain. I expect a new one will be up on the 12th, but that you can find the Polzik on in the archives after that.

Update 3: Here’s another summary of the experiment. It isn’t clear quite how much information is being transferred in the teleport, but this article notes that it was achieved with a fidelity of 0.6 (i.e. 60% accuracy) which it compares favorably with the 0.5 you’d expect from a classical information transfer. It is interesting that the quantum entanglement is so much more accurate (and that the “real world” is so inaccurate). At the same time, however, I’d be disinclined to trust a Star Trek-style teleporter that was only 60% accurate.