Scientists Achieved Orbital Teleportation, Great News For Quantum Internet

While the science fiction genre has provided the world with many of its most impressive innovations, none present more fascination and challenges than teleportation. Thanks to the efforts of a team of scientists, it is now possible to teleport photons up into space. This is not only exciting as far as the concept of teleportation goes but also the matter of quantum internet for the whole world.

Now, before anyone gets too excited, it should be noted that this topic is not about sending humans to a ship in space from Earth and back in an instant. This is about deploying information at the speed of light over long distances. That’s why this achievement is a huge milestone for the development of quantum internet and quantum computing, Futurism reports.

This is not the first time that teleportation was done either, it’s just the longest. The previous year saw scientists teleport particles outside the laboratory.

With regards to this new development, which was achieved by scientists in China, they were able to send the particle to a satellite in orbit called Micius. The total distance traveled rounds off to about 311 miles. In a statement given to the Technology Review of MIT, the Chinese team notes how important this achievement is in quantum computing.

“Long-distance teleportation has been recognized as a fundamental element in protocols such as large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation,” the team said.

For those who are starting to get confused as to what teleportation and quantum computing have to do with each other, the link lies in the very nature of teleportation itself. Basically, teleportation involves something called quantum entanglement, which basically involve two particles forming at the same time and at the same point.

Regardless of the distance between the particle, they influence each other. This means that one can send information or other particles from one point of the quantum entanglement pair to another. Thus, teleportation is achieved.