The words “quantum teleportation” bring forth the image of transporting a person from one location to another. Although it is applied very differently than its portrayal in science fiction movies, teleportation is possible, and has been carried out in laboratories around the world. In 2012, a team of scientists in Austria set a new world record distance of 143 km for successful teleportation.

Like something out of Star Trek, quantum teleportation has earned a sensational name because it allows all the information about an object to be scanned and reproduced in a new location. ‘Quantum’ refers to a theory in physics based on the principle that matter and energy have properties of both waves and particles. Also known as ‘entanglement- assisted teleportation,’ quantum teleportation involves the transmission of a qubit—the basic unit of quantum information—from one point to another without visibly moving through the intervening space.

Before 1993, researchers believed that in order to achieve teleportation, the position and momentum of each particle in an object must be measured, and sent to a receiving end in order to re-build the object. This process can be likened to taking a photograph of an object, and using the image to build a model of the original object.

However, there was a fundamental problem to this approach, known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg determined that the position and momentum of any particle could never be measured at the same time—a necessary requirement for this method of teleportation. If position and momentum could not be measured simultaneously, no photograph of the object could be taken nor used to recreate it in another location; thus, scientists were forced to abandon this classical approach to teleportation.

Fortunately, in 1993, researchers successfully demonstrated that this problem could be overcome, if the original object was destroyed during teleportation, based on a theory known as quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a complicated phenomenon; but what is important about this process is that it allows information to be relayed from one location to another. Essentially, it makes teleportation possible, because the particles share an inextricable bond—whatever happens to one particle happens to the other, regardless of how far apart they are. Think of it like a fax, but where the original is destroyed the moment the copy is received.

“Once you disembody the state of the particle, you can then recreate the particle in a remote copy,” said physicist and computer scientist Charles Bennett of IBM, who coauthored the first paper on quantum teleportation in 1993.

As explained by the research page from the IBM website, quantum teleportation follows this process:

Two objects B and C are brought into contact and separated. This process creates an inextricable bond between the two objects.

Object B is taken to the sending station, while object C is taken to the receiving station.

The item to be teleported, object A, is scanned together with B. Since B and C are inextricably linked, the scanned information is sent to the receiving station, and will transform object C into object A, thereby teleporting A from one location to another.

Quantum teleportation, however, is not only a cool scientific experiment—it allows scientists to instantly send information from the sender to the receiver, without the possibility of interception. As a result, physicists around the world have begun to envision a quantum Internet, which would be based on communications between the Earth and satellites to create an incredibly secure global communications network. Other potential applications of quantum teleportation involve unbreakable encryption, as well as more efficient computers.

While it might be disappointing to science fiction fans that scientists cannot zap humans from work back to home, there is still a chance in the future that this concept could become a reality. Last November, a group of Chinese scientists succeeding in transporting a macro object—100 million atoms of the chemical element Rubidium—with an accuracy of about 90 percent. Although more research needs to be conducted before the human body— which has close to 10^29 atoms—can be transported with 100 per cent accuracy, there are no theoretical reasons as to why this cannot be done.