Idea of teleportation

Most of us have watched “The Centurions” that used to be telecasted on cartoon network in 90’s. The 3 main protagonist Max Ray, Jake Rockwell & Ace Mccloud used to be teleported from the their space station “Sky Vault” along with weapons by 2 magic words “power extreme!”

Teleportation has always been an imperative theme in many Sci-Fi novels and TV shows.

There are few types of teleportation techniques we have observed in fiction:

1. Transport entire object from 1 place to another by exploiting a wormhole (fabric of space / time)
2. Dismantle the atoms of the object and transport them over the medium of light
3. Scan the object to understand its constituents at atom level, then send the information about its constituent through any communication channel and recreate the object by assembling the object based on the instructions received.

In 1930’s Einstein was baffled by a concept observation where 2 particles linked by a quantum property demonstrate inexplicable communication at a long distance. This was coined as entanglement much later.

In order to explain this simply, imagine 2 particles that were created at a same point instant in space. There are entangled in a way that if you try to measure 1, the other particle will get influenced automatically irrespective of the space barrier. Lets say 1 particle is on earth and other entangled on moon. They are not connected by any wire or signal. The moment, 1 on earth is measured, the 1 on moon changes its property.

This was so eerie that Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance” and strongly rejected quantum science to be incomplete and incomprehensible.

Today, this theory has enabled scientists to achieve teleportation with method (3) using qubit. In lab A, scientists generate an entangled EPR pair of qubits. 1 entangled qubit is sent to location B and the other kept at lab A. Bell measurement of qubit to be teleported and EPR pair qubit is performed and the resulted information transported through classical channels.

The qubit is recreated in lab B taking help of the entangled qubit and the information state received from the bell measurement of the transmitted qubit. This experiment has been successfully conducted in labs of 2 Canary islands.