Topic > Quantum Entanglement: What is Quantum Teleportation?

Quantum teleportation is the feat in which an object is disintegrated in one place and then perfectly rebuilt elsewhere, destroying the original copy in the process. It's very similar to the process someone would go through to fax a piece of paper, only the original copy is destroyed once the fax is complete. As fictional as it may seem, it may soon become reality, but not in the way you might think. The concept of teleportation was first introduced in the early 20th century through science fiction. He was often seen in superhero comics and a few decades later on screen in the popular Star Trek series. It was seen as nothing more than an unattainable concept that would only be recognized as fiction. This widely accepted thought was held until 1993, when a group at Stanford University discovered a technique that would allow literal teleportation. This concept was used in 1998 by a team of practical physicists at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) who achieved quantum teleportation by transporting a photon (a particle of light) more than one meter. Six years later, in 2004, another Australian team managed to surpass this milestone by teleporting an entire stream of photons, in the form of a laser beam, through a laboratory. How did they do it? Using a concept called “quantum entanglement”. Quantum entanglement is the process in which two photons are joined together, or "entangled", making the information they carry identical. This is useful in teleportation because when the first photon is sent through the cable to its destination, the information in the second photon is modified with a laser, which simultaneously modifies the information encoded in the first photon. Once the quantum entanglement process reaches completion, it is expected to become a mainstream method of data storage and transfer by early 2018, speeding up the process in which information is moved from one computer to another. This circuit not only takes up millimeters of space, but also broke a quantum speed record: Andreas and his team's new system can teleport 10,000 qubits of information per second, beating the quantum speed of previous methods, which could only handle a little more than two thirds. of this, being able to teleport 7,100 qubits of information per second. This recent innovation means we can process more data per second, allowing us to teleport greater amounts of information every second. This seemingly obvious statement may not seem like much, but for physicists around the world, it's a step toward transporting solid matter, which could ultimately be human matter..