Whether it’s the sci-fi future of beaming humans across space or the more grounded concept of quantum computing, our visions of teleportation so far have always clung to a central premise: the ability to transport quantum states between distant particles, known as entanglement. A property first described by Einstein back in the 1930s, entanglement represents some of the most outlandish physics of the subatomic world—specifically, the fact that particles can experience an inexplicable, invisible link across even vast distances.
When the position, orientation, and other properties of a particle are transmitted to an entangled particle somewhere else, the receiving particle immediately takes on the characteristics of the original one. But because of a little-understood property of quantum physics, the original particle spontaneously ceases to exist the instant the information is transferred. The result is a perfect physical representation of the particle elsewhere, which makes it easy to see how quantum entanglement could be the basis for teleporting large objects like goods or people when blown up to the macro scale.
Researchers and scientists have been using knowledge of entanglement to teleport particles since the first successful experiment in 1997, but the transmission of information is incredibly fragile and prone to signal decay and decoherence (when the quantum system breaks down and can be explained through classical physics) when interacting with other waveforms and fields. That means the only real success stories so far have been around sending entangled particle information through dedicated channels like standalone fiber optic connections.
That is, until now. In a groundbreaking scientific experiment, a team at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering managed to teleport a particle through around 18 miles of public internet infrastructure. They published their results last December in the peer-reviewed journal Optica.
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