Many inventions from nowadays were once just subjects for sci-fi movies. From video calling, cloning, artificial organs, intelligent robots, space travel, and much more – they are all possible in our times. Many people are wondering if we should also add teleportation to this list.
Will we ever be able to transmit ourselves to the beach during our vacations instantly, so we could skip the annoying traffic? Although it’s not yet entirely possible, scientists are making some progress towards that goal.
Quantum teleportation proved to work
Quantum teleportation (aka quantum entanglement) can allow particles to influence each other even if they are not physically connected. This type of teleportation transports information and not matter. It’s also a phenomenon predicted by a physicist that you may have heard of: Albert Einstein.
A team of scientists achieved quantum teleportation by using individual electrons. They have shown that pairs of photons have the potential to form entangled qubits, the basic unit of quantum information. The discovery hints that these qubits could be involved in quantum teleportation.
John Nichol, who is an assistant professor of physics from the University of Rochester, and also co-author of the study, declared:
We provide evidence for ‘entanglement swapping,’ in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and ‘quantum gate teleportation,’ a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation,
He further concluded:
Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.
Of course, this discovery is very far from making a whole human being teleport itself. A typical and full-grown human generally has 7*1027 atoms in his body. Being able to quantum entangle only two electrons can be just a small step if we look at the whole context, but it’s still an amazing milestone for science.
The new study paper was published in Nature Communications.
