Us human beings seem to be very “record driven”, so to speak. After all, there is always cause for celebration whenever a new achievement is ‘unlocked’ in real life. Well, the realm of teleportation can still be said to be in its infancy, but this does not mean that there has been no progress at all. No sir, in fact, researchers has just announced that they successfully “teleported” or transmitted quantum encrypted data over a distance of 102 kilometers, which is approximately 63 miles, shattering the previous record by a factor of four, now how about that?
This particular breakthrough involves going beyond a normal fiber optic network which would usually see millions or billions of photons sent. In other words, a classical light pulse. When one kicks off with a billion photons, the number might drop to a million along the way, which is why repeaters are used to boost the light pulses. Quantum physics will operate on a different level – that of individual photons, and the experiment involves teleporting a photon in an unknown state of “superposition”.
To be able to transmit or teleport these photons across a distance of 100km is a breakthrough, since it would translate to upping the ante for a new way of data encryption that might end up as reality for real-world use in due time. However, there is still much more work that needs to be done before it heads in such a direction.