European team bests Chinese record at teleporting distance
(Phys.org) -- A European team of physicists has bested the record set by a team of Chinese researchers last month for distance in teleporting quantum bits (qubits). Where the Chinese team accomplished their feat by teleporting photons across a lake, the European team did so by performing the same feat across the ocean between two islands off the coast of Africa. It was apparently no easy feat as the team describes in the paper they’ve written and uploaded to the preprint server arXiv; they had so much foul weather to contend with that their experiment took nearly a year to complete. The record breaking distance by the Chinese team was close to 100 meters. The Europeans bested that mark by almost fifty meters, setting up a possible rivalry between the two teams to see which might be the first to successfully teleport a qubit to an orbiting satellite.