Data teleportation: The quantum space race
Great profile piece from Zeeya Merali published in Nature:
Three years ago, Jian-Wei Pan brought a bit of Star Trek to the Great Wall of China. From a site near the base of the wall in the hills north of Beijing, he and his team of physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei aimed a laser at a detector on a rooftop 16 kilometres away, then used the quantum properties of the laser’s photons to ‘teleport’ information across the intervening space. At the time, it was a world distance record for quantum teleportation, and a major step towards the team’s ultimate aim of teleporting photons to a satellite.
The piece details both Pan and also his relationship with frenemy Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. Great human story and also the science is fucking mindblowing holy shit.