Teleportation may be closer than we think

By: H&I Staff     Posted: July 13, 2017, 4:49PM    Tags: teleportation, satellite, star trek

"Beam me up, Scotty!"

Teleportation has always been a staple in science fiction, but it's finally making its way into real-life science. The MIT Technology Review reported on Monday that researchers in China managed to teleport a photon to the Micius satellite over 310 miles in the sky. Though this isn't the first time teleportation has been successful, this is the largest scale that it's ever been achieved at. In fact, this distance caused the photon to travel through a vacuum to get to its destination in the satellite.

Were researchers attempting to learn how to transfer objects via teleportation? Not quite. The real reason behind this experiment was to create a quantum internet that would prevent even the finest of hackers from getting in. According to the Technology Review, this kind of research has been done since the 1990s when scientists discovered how to transmit quantum information.

"Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function."

Surely, we won't be able to eliminate our commute time with teleportation in the near future, but this resarch is promising to say the least.