Chinese Scientists Teleport Object

Chinese scientists have reportedly teleported an object from Earth to a satellite 300 miles in space and MIT didn't even blink. 

The experiment, which involved photons were reportedly beamed from a ground station in Ngari, Tibet to China's Micius satellite, setting a record for what is called quantum teleportation, reported The Guardian.

Quantum teleportation is a method in which complete properties of a particle can be instantly transferred to another, "teleporting" it to a distant location.

"Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world," said the MIT Technology Review about the Chinese experiment. "The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function."

The MIT review said the teleportation could be the building block for a wide range of new technologies.

"Long-distance teleportation has been recognized as a fundamental element in protocols such as large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation," said the Chinese team, per the MIT review.

Time magazine said the Chinese experiment follows physicists successfully conducting the world's first quantum teleportation outside of a lab a year ago. Scientists at that time determined quantum teleportation, which is often depicted as a futuristic transportation tool associated with "Star Trek" movies, is actually possible, said Time.

"An arbitrary unknown quantum state cannot be precisely measured or perfectly replicated," said the Chinese researchers in their study published online Wednesday on the open access site arXiv.

"However, quantum teleportation allows faithful transfer of unknown quantum states from one object to another over long distance, without physical travelling of the object itself. Long-distance teleportation has been recognized as a fundamental element in protocols such as large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation."

"However, the previous teleportation experiments between distant locations were limited to a distance on the order of 100 kilometers, due to photon loss in optical fibres or terrestrial free-space channels."

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