The Optics Blog: Teleportation –from Fiction to Reality?

“Beam me up, Scotty”, who hasn’t yet heard this phrase from Star-Trek? Beaming – alias teleportation –is a favored part of many science fiction stories and thus well-known by publics. Probably most of us would like to have a teleportation tool, for saving stressful traveling time, or to experience famous adventures on alien planets… During the last ten years you may have heard that scientists have successfully entered the field of teleportation. But, is it the same teleportation as in Stark Trek? Let us find out what fiction is and what to reality belongs.

In Star Trek, humans and materials are teleported with superluminal speed from one place to another – empty - place. Thereby, teleported is the matter (atoms) or energy and the information in which state the matter is. Mostly, the teleportation process is controlled by a station which can act as receiver or sender. In Science things are a bit more complicated as usual, but the good news is that there exists no physical law which prohibits the teleportation of humans – it is only quite complex to do so. Today, mostly single photons are teleported. Contrary to Star Trek and similar, in reality you can teleport only the information of a state and not its matter or energy. As a consequence, you need at the receiver place already the same type of matter/ energy onto which you can overwrite the state of the particle which you want to teleport. Furthermore, you can´t do it with superluminal velocity, hence no causality violation. The reason is that the particle at the sender and the one at the receiver´s place have to be specially prepared, namely to be entangled together. The entanglement allows the teleportation of the state of a particle with superluminal velocity (Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”) but to read out this information for further processing, the receiver needs some special information from the sender -after he performed a special action to the particle- which he can get only with not superluminal velocity (by phone etc). Another point is the entanglement process for more complex systems. Photons and ions are routinely entangled, but even simple molecules are very hard to do so. To my knowledge, single Buckminsterfullerene (C60, 60 carbon atoms) are the biggest systems which have been entangled (diameter around 0.7nm). But they haven’t yet been teleported, because as larger an entangled system is, as shorter the duration of the entanglement state. Now, imagine a human body and you will understand why it is quite difficult to teleport us. Hence, “beam me up, Scotty” has to stay for longer time in fiction.

These days, teleportation in the lab with photons is already routinely done. The teleported distance increases continuous and is over 100km for teleportation in free space as in fibers. Furthermore, teleportation using ions (spin) have been demonstrated too. In future, scientists are planning to teleport larger atom complexes (fullerene) up to small bacteria. But until this time has arrived, new techniques have to be developed.

Nevertheless, theoretically humans could be teleported but the question arises, if our body is teleported, will our spirit, our soul be teleported too? Nobody knows.

Video from the teleportation group in Geneva (in french):