CANBERRA, AFP) - Teleportation always used to seem so simple. All it took was a quick call to Mr Scott, and Star Trek's Captain Kirk would be beamed up from the cheap-looking scenery of some alien planet and materialise on the Starship Enterprise.


These days it's all about lasers, subatomic particles and very hard sums, but one Australian research team's world-beating discoveries in the field seem almost as far-fetched as the science fiction version.


The multinational group from Canberra's Australian National University (ANU) have become the first on this particular planet to demonstrate the sharing of secrets via teleportation using quantum physics.


Who cares? Well, a lot of big businesses, because their discovery has moved unbreakable codes, superfast computers and communications inaccessible to cybercriminals a step closer.


What the team's find boils down to is that, using a laser, they can teleport to a network of recipients a signal which can only be reassembled by a majority of the recipients. Any less and the signal cannot be reconstituted.


The team's leader, Chinese-born Ping Koy Lam, was building on work done by the university in 2002, when they teleported information using a laser beam.


But Ping described the latest achievement as "a much more complex form of information teleportation in the sense that it involves multiple recipients."


Teleportation is defined as the production, disembodiment and successful reconstruction of a signal, which in this case was a high frequency sound to three participants. The message in the future may be spoken or typed.

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