Teleportation

Teleportation refers to the theoretical act of instantaneously traveling between two locations without physically crossing the space between them. Teleportation has been featured prominently in works of fiction, including, novels, films, television shows, and comics.

There are no known methods for teleportation. The field of quantum teleportation studies the transportation of information between particles, but not the transport of matter. Proposed methods of human teleportation include the following:

• The destructive scanning of the body, transmitting this and information, and then reconstructing the body in a new location.
• Wormholes—these speculative structures would allow for faster than light travel and not facilitate teleportation.
• Quantum teleportation—this field concerns the transfer of information (quantum states) across space not matter.

A teleportation-like device was first mentioned in fiction by Edward Page Mitchell in his short story The Man Without a Body, published in 1877, in The Sun, a New York City daily. The word teleportation did not appear, however. Instead, the device was referred to as "matter transfer."

Teleportation as a method of travel between planets appeared in Fred T Jane's 1897 science-fiction parody "To Venus in Five Seconds."

The word "teleportation" was coined by American writer Charles Fort in 1931 in his book Lo!.

Proposed theoretically in 1993, quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles to infer the state of a third particle. Quantum teleportation has been demonstrated multiple times using:

• Two-level states of a single photon
• A single photon and a trapped ion (among other quantum objects)
• Two photons

The basic principle can be demonstrated using a pair of entangled particles, a sender and a receiver. In quantum mechanics, entanglement is a phenomenon where two or more objects have to be described in reference to one another, even if the objects are spatially separated. Quantum entanglement leads to correlations between the observable physical properties of the systems.

If the "sender" entangled particle interacts with a third particle (of unknown state), the outcome of that interaction can be determined by measurements of the "receiver" entangled particle due to the correlations between the two. Therefore, information about the third particle's state has been transported across space.