Teleportation refers to instantaneous transport of an object or matter from one place to a predetermined location. In this mode of travel, the object or matter being transported is broken down and immediately recreated somewhere else. In quantum teleportation, which is the favored teleportation type in laboratories, the properties of the origin quantum system are recreated in the destination quantum system even if the two quantum systems do not have physical contact.

Most people, however, hold to the belief that teleportation will forever remain fiction, with the more knowledgeable pointing to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as the primary obstacle to teleportation becoming a reality. This principle states that you cannot know the position of a particle and its speed at the same time; if you don't know where the particle is (its position), then how can you teleport it?

Quantum Teleportation Experiments

In 1993, a team of researchers at IBM, led by physicist Charles Bennet, theoretically confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible but only if the original material was destroyed. In 1998, teams from Caltech and Europe were able to successfully teleport a photon: reading the atomic structure of the photon, sending the information across a 3-foot coaxial cable, and creating a duplicate of the original photon, and – as Charles Bennet and the IBM team predicted – the original photon no longer existed when the duplicate was created.Quantum Teleportation

The experiment involved a phenomenon called entanglement, a still unexplained phenomenon between paired particles where a change in one particle instantly causes a change in the other, with no concern for the distance between them.

The Caltech experiment involved three photons (labeled A, B and C) in which the latter two are entangled. The scientists extracted some information from photon A, and the remaining information is passed to photon B through entanglement and then, from B to C. The information from photon A is therefore passed to photon C which replicates A by combining information from B. In the process, photon A is unalterably changed and disappears.

In 2004, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado and the University of Insbruck in Austria, were able to transmit the quantum state of an atom to another atom without a direct link between the two, in effect transporting solid matter between two atoms.

In 2006, scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen succeeded in teleporting information from a laser beam into a cloud of atoms – in effect, teleporting information between two different objects, light and matter where one (light) is the carrier of information, and the other (atoms) are the storage medium.

The experiments are seen as steps forward towards one goal of quantum teleportation – the development of quantum computers which would replace current binary bits (1s and 0s) with quantum bits or qubits, transmitting and processing data using entanglement instead of circuits. Eighty (80) entangled qubits will contain an amazing 151 trillion gigabytes of processing power – around 2.3 trillion times faster than today's currently 'fast' 64-bit architecture.