Washington, DC: A group of Chinese scientists has successfully achieved teleportation up to 9.9 miles, using quantum entanglement of photons.
The feat could lead to faster and smaller quantum-based computers and unbreakable, encrypted communication across the world.
"This is the longest reported distance over which photonic teleportation has been achieved to date, more than 20 times longer than the previous implementation," Discovery News quoted Cheng-Zhi Peng, one of the co-authors of the study and a scientist at University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, as saying.
In science fiction, teleportation usually describes the transfer of matter from one point to another, more or less instantaneously - a spooky aspect of quantum mechanics.
According to the theory, bits of light and matter can become entangled with one another and anything that happens to one particle will happen to the other, regardless of the distance or intervening matter. What the Chinese scientists managed to do was transmit change of state information from photon to photon over a distance of 16 kilometers.
The scientists are ecstatic about the distance they managed to cover. Ten miles is far enough to start thinking about a next-generation satellite communications network based on quantum teleportation, said both Schumacher and Peng.
A teleported telephone call, although no faster than a regular one, would however, be impenetrable and eavesdropping on a teleported telephone call would be impossible. The research could also dramatically speed up computing power. Practical ground-to-satellite teleportation could be in place in as little as two years, said Schumacher.
With sophisticated telescopes, radar and a low-Earth orbit satellite, the Chinese scientists expect they can teleport information from Earth to a spacecraft and back down to Earth.
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