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  • Essay / Quantum entanglement: what is quantum teleportation?

    Quantum teleportation is the feat in which an object is disintegrated in one location and then perfectly reconstructed elsewhere, thereby destroying the original copy. This is very similar to the process someone would follow to fax a piece of paper, only the original copy is shredded once the fax is complete. As fictional as it may seem, it could soon become a reality, but not in the way you might think. The concept of teleportation was first introduced in the early 20th century as part of science fiction. He was often seen in superhero comics and a few decades later on screen in the popular Star Trek series. It was nothing more than an inaccessible concept that would only ever be recognized as fiction. This widely accepted idea held true until 1993, when a group at Stanford University discovered a technique allowing literal teleportation. This concept was used in 1998 by a team of practicing physicists at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) who achieved quantum teleportation by transporting a photon (a particle of light) more than a meter. Six years later, in 2004, another Australian group surpassed that by teleporting an entire stream of photons, in the form of a laser beam, through a laboratory. How did they do this, you ask? Using a concept called “quantum entanglement”. Quantum entanglement is the process in which two photons are joined, or “entangled,” making the information they carry identical. This is useful in teleportation because when the first photon is sent through the cable to its destination, the information in the second photon is changed with a laser, which simultaneously changes the information encoded in the first photon. Once the quantum entanglement process is complete, it is expected that this method will become a common method of storing and transferring data by early 2018, speeding up the process of moving information from one computer to another. Not only does this circuit take up millimeters of space, it also broke a quantum speed record: Andreas and his team's new system can teleport 10,000 qubits of information per second, beating previous quantum speed methods , who could only manage a little more than two-thirds. including 7,100 qubits of information per second. This recent advancement means that we are able to process a greater amount of data per second, allowing us to teleport greater amounts of information each second. This seemingly obvious statement may seem small, but for physicists around the world, it is one step closer to transporting solid matter, which could eventually become human matter..