Physicists in Cambridge, London and Gdansk have brought quantum teleportation closer to becoming a practical reality. An important milestone was reached when researchers found a new way to transport quantum information across distances at the speed of light, conceivably opening the way for the teleportation of objects.

The process makes use of ‘entanglement’, a quantum law by which the behaviour of pairs of particles continues to correlate, even when the particles are separated by arbitrarily large distances, to transmit information across vast distances at the speed of light. Unlike that staple of science fiction, conventional teleportation, the object itself is not transported.

This most recent advance, published in Physical Review Letters, concerns the efficiency of the entanglement process, and could allow multiple objects to be teleported without destroying the necessary state of entanglement. Sergii Strelchuk from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics explains: “Entanglement can be thought of as the fuel, which powers teleportation. Our protocol is more fuel efficient, able to use entanglement thriftily while eliminating the need for error correction.”

Formerly considered impossible, the feasibility of quantum teleportation was first calculated in 1993, however it was not until November of last year that quantum teleportation was reported at a macroscopic level.

Though the work undertaken by Cambridge scientists was entirely theoretical, the possible implications of their research were highlighted by recent experiments in China, which have reported the teleportation of photons over a distance of 143km, a significant milestone representing the minimum distance between the ground and satellites in orbit. 

As to the practical impact of this research, Strelchuk goes on to note that “We have also found a generalised teleportation technique which we hope will find applications in areas such as quantum computation”. The hypothetical quantum computer would be able to use quantum phenomena to represent data as quantum bits (qubits) rather than binary as digits, and could consequently make calculations at a significantly higher rate.

Larger scale teleportation, as is most famously found in Star Trek, regrettably remains firmly within the milieu of science fiction.