"Star Trek" served as an inspiration for the scientific community, wherein one of the most favorite scenes is teleportation. It may seem impossible, but a team of German scientists used special laser beams and successfully teleported technical language without transferring properties of energy or matter.
One of the principal investigators, Alexander Szameit, Ph.D. from the University of Jena in Germany, said that a lot of seemingly impossible technical wonders used in the sci-fi show have become part of everyday life.
Now, they found a way to make teleporting become a reality in the near future.
"Elementary particles such as electrons and light particles exist per se in a spatially delocalized state," said Szameit.
Simply put, without any loss of time, there is a probability that these particles can exist in multiple places at one moment. Dubbed quantum teleportation — it is a concept that has been present in scientific discussions, but no real experiments conducted to establish it.
For the first time, the team demonstrated that teleportation does not only exist in quantum particles, but also in the classical world. To land to their findings, they used a special kind of laser beams.
"As can be done with the physical states of elementary particles, the properties of light beams can also be entangled," said Marco Ornigotti, Ph.D., a co-investigator for the study.
The needed information would be linked to a specific property of the light. Even though it only works locally, the team found that classic information was teleported immediately.
The findings can be applied in real life, particularly in the field of communication. Moreover, even if it is a very long way ahead, the experiment sheds light on the possibility that someday people may no longer need to travel through trains, planes or buses.
Or at least have some of their properties be there with the help of quantum technology.
The study was published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.
