Teleportation

Beaming is often used as a synonym for teleportation and refers to the hypothetical transmission of an object in the form of radiation. To this end, the object must be “dematerialized” at the sender, i.e. broken down into its components, which are then sent as a beam and “materialized” at the destination, i.e. reconverted into matter. In this way it is achieved that an object, similar to teleportation, disappears at the place of origin and reappears at the destination. However, there is a continuous transmission path along which the matter (possibly in a converted form) traverses the physical space. Therefore, strictly speaking, beaming is not teleportation. The concept mainly originates from the science fiction series Star Trek, where people and inanimate objects are transported back and forth between places using so-called transporter devices.

In the real world, it has so far not been possible to beam objects. For one thing, there is no available technology that can disintegrate or reassemble arbitrary objects atom by atom, let alone within seconds. Furthermore, the required amount of information to fully represent macroscopic objects is far too large for today's available information technology.[11] Another obstacle often cited in this context is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which prohibits the simultaneous measurement of position and momentum of individual particles with arbitrary precision. At room temperature and even far below, however, this poses no limitation, since position and momentum of individual particles fluctuate statistically and do not have to be determined precisely.

Moreover, the science fiction concepts for beaming do not get it exactly clear what kind of radiation the matter would be converted to.[12] There are only two types of radiation in physics that come into question: Electromagnetic radiation (radio waves, light, X-rays, gamma rays etc.) and particle radiation (alpha and beta rays, neutrons, neutrinos, atoms etc.). According to the current state of knowledge, electromagnetic radiation alone cannot transport matter, since it only transmits the energy, but not the baryons and leptons required to create atoms. If, alternatively, a beam of matter particles was sent, this would offer hardly any advantage over transporting the object as a whole. On the one hand, accelerating and decelerating the particles would require the same amount of energy as for the original object. So there would be no speed advantage. On the other hand, particle beams can hardly penetrate layers of matter along the transmission path (which is supposedly possible in the science-fiction concepts within some limits).

A realistic form of beaming could be the transfer of pure information and the use of matter available at the destination to perform materialization. Then however, beaming would merely be the construction of a remote copy.

Quantum teleportation is distinct from regular teleportation, as it does not transfer matter from one place to another, but rather transmits the information necessary to prepare a (microscopic) target system in the same quantum state as the source system. The scheme was named quantum “teleportation”, because certain properties of the source system are recreated in the target system without any apparent information carrier propagating between the two.

In many cases, such as normal matter at room temperature, the exact quantum state of a system is irrelevant for any practical purpose (because it fluctuates rapidly anyway, it "decoheres"), and the necessary information to recreate the system is classical. In those cases, quantum teleportation may be replaced by the simple transmission of classical information, such as radio communication.

In 1993, Bennett et al[13] proposed that a quantum state of a particle could be transferred to another distant particle, without moving the two particles at all. This is called quantum state teleportation. There are many following theoretical and experimental papers published.[14][15][16] Researchers believe that quantum teleportation is the foundation of quantum calculation and quantum communication.

In 2008, M. Hotta[17] proposed that it may be possible to teleport energy by exploiting quantum energy fluctuations of an entangled vacuum state of a quantum field. There are some papers published but no experimental verification.

In 2014, researcher Ronald Hanson and colleagues from the Technical University Delft in the Netherlands, demonstrated the teleportation of information between two entangled quantumbits three metres apart.[18]

In 2016, Y. Wei showed that in a generalization of quantum mechanics, particles themselves could teleport from one place to another.[19] This is called particle teleportation. With this concept, superconductivity can be viewed as the teleportation of some electrons in the superconductor and superfluidity as the teleportation of some of the atoms in the cellular tube. This effect is not predicted to occur in standard quantum mechanics.