Is Teleportation Becoming a Reality?

Will We Be Able to Beam Ourselves to Other Locations?

Those born between 1960 and 2000 remember Scotty, the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, teleporting the crew of the Enterprise traveling through the stars in the Star Trek series. As the Enterprise traveled from planet to planet, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and others would teleport to planets or other starships via teleportation. The vision of this series, made in the 1960s, was that in the distant future, people would have teleportation technology. If we were to define teleportation, it can be defined as the energization and separation of the teleported object into particles at one point, and then the rearrangement of these energy particles at another point to form the same object.

What is Quantum Teleportation?

Recent technology has made it possible to transport small pools of particles or photons from one place to another, i.e. “teleportation”. This quantum mechanical phenomenon is known as quantum transport. This process has advanced applications in many electronic concepts such as advanced communication technologies and super-fast quantum computers. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that every measurement changes the state of the particle. If you determine exactly where a particle is, you will involuntarily change its speed at the same time. Therefore, both the position and the speed of the particle cannot be determined exactly. A solution to this problem was offered by the quantum teleporter that the scientists around Anton Zeilinger managed to build in 1993. The theoretical preparatory work that forms the basis of teleportation was done by the physicist C.H. Bennet.

Spooky Action at a Distance

In the quantum world, pairs of particles can be produced that behave in the same way no matter how far apart they are. If one of these particles is “measured”, this measurement also affects the second particle and changes its state. Einstein described this as the “spooky action at a distance effect”. Scientists today speak of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. As a result, a teleporter does not have to completely measure the particle it wants to teleport. With the help of the basic idea of ​​the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, it can transmit information that it cannot measure simply by using the above-mentioned phantom distance effect. Therefore, teleportation does not violate the principle of physics. However, Bennet was only able to teleport a few particles.

The First Successful Teleportation Experiment

The first successful experiment of quantum teleportation was done by Anton Zeilinger in 1998, as I mentioned above, and this experiment involved entanglement exchange, or teleportation of an entangled state. Zeilinger’s group experimentally performed the entanglement exchange, which was later applied to test delayed entanglement. In 1998, Zeilinger’s group became the first group to implement quantum cryptography with entangled photons. Zeilinger is widely known for the first quantum teleportation of an independent qubit (the simplest unit of information at the quantum level). He later expanded this work to develop a source for quantum teleportation and teleported qubits that freely traveled 144 kilometers between two Canary Islands. If we look at the latest developments and experiments that have been carried out to push the boundaries of quantum teleportation, we can see that there have been significant developments.

Qbit and Teleportation

In 2023, researchers were able to teleport quantum information from a photon to a solid-state qubit over a distance of 1 km using multiple quantum memories. In 2015, scientists were able to teleport quantum information from one rubidium atom cluster to another rubidium atom cluster over a distance of 150 meters using entangled photons. In 2020, researchers achieved quantum teleportation over a total distance of 44 km with accuracies exceeding 90%. In 2015, researchers broke a record for quantum teleportation over a distance of 102 km via optical fiber. So, as you can see, there are quite serious developments in teleportation technology.

Human Teleportation Technology

Of course, it would be much more difficult to teleport an entire human being consisting of approximately a thousand billion particles. However, with the rapid development of current technology, teleportation technology may become a reality in another 30 years. For example, those born in 1970 had neither color TV programs, nor today’s computers, nor the internet, nor artificial intelligence. But 30 years later, in 2000, almost all of these existed. Today, there are technologies that could not have been imagined in 1970. In other words, teleportation technology, which seems difficult today, may very easily exist in the 2050s.

However, as I mentioned above, there are studies that need to continue until teleportation technology is fully developed, but even then, there are many areas of application that these studies can be used in, from long-distance communication to defense technologies. In fact, very serious advances have already been made for high-speed quantum computers and scientific advances thanks to this technology. It is imperative that these technologies are also in our country, otherwise, our country will fall behind in these technologies that are in the US and NATO and will create both defense and R&D weaknesses.