New development for teleportation technology: First step taken!

By taking teleportation technology from science fiction to the physical world, scientists say they have taken the first big step towards real-life teleportation.

New work by an international group of scientists has for the first time made it possible to "beam" images over a network without physically sending the image itself. Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain used a cutting-edge technique that transmits images using an advanced "quantum form of communication". The scientists used quantum optics to extend the "alphabet" to send more complex information, such as fingerprints or faces.


Instead of physically transmitting images, this new approach uses a "teleportation-inspired configuration". The teleportation-inspired nature of the transmission means that the information does not physically travel between the parties, as in a smartphone or TV broadcast.

Fingerprints sent directly

One potential application of this technology is in the banking sector. Teleportation technology allows customers to send their fingerprints directly to a bank without using any physical means. This makes the process virtually impossible to be tampered with by hackers.

Quantum teleportation requires pairs of entangled electrons to be created and then removed from each other. But this process is very challenging. Photons naturally tend to spread over long distances, while electrons tend to be confined to a single location. The researchers therefore turned to a new method called "entanglement exchange". This means that one of two entangled particles interacts with a third particle, making it entangled with the other particle.

With this method, the team realized the entanglement between quantum gates, the basic information processing unit of quantum processors, without using photons. In previous studies, the entanglement between two gates has only been realized with photons. The results also open a new avenue for quantum teleportation research and show that single electrons can be useful in qubit semiconductors.