China Close to Achieving Advanced Teleportation Technology

I may as well warn you right away that this article isn’t going to be talking about Star Trek style teleportation technology. Hopefully one day I’ll get to talk about the latest in personal teleportation devices, but sadly that day is not yet in sight.

Real teleportation devices as they exist today, don’t have the ability to mystically transport objects from one location to the other. Instead quantum teleportation is a technique that is used to transfer quantum information between two quantum systems.

So what does that actually mean? Well in practical terms quantum teleportation can either be used to run quantum computations or as a form of highly secure long range communication (see video below for a more detailed explanation).

In May Nature reported that China had achieved successful quantum teleportation over a distance of 16KM without the use of cables. A move which indicates that China are close to being able to use quantum teleportation as a means of transferring data globally through the use of satellites.

Then in the recent batch of released Wikileak cables, the file marked #10BEIJING263 (*link removed due to stability issues*) indicates that China could be near to achieving dual-particle teleportation (something no one else has achieved as yet).

Of course the Chinese aren’t the only country to be working on quantum teleporters, with labs in Canada, US, UK, Germany, France and Japan all working on similar devices. However, only the Harvard team have been able to achieve anywhere near the same free space transportation of quantum information as the Chinese team have.

The Wikileak cable indicates that the Chinese are confident that they will be able to use free space quantum teleportation to help encrypt (and decode) their (and other peoples) communication data. Should they manage it, the Chinese will have a significant advantage over the rest of the world in terms of data transference, encryption and manipulation techniques.

As it seems the US and China are the only two world powers to currently be heavily investing in this kind of technology, we could well be seeing the start of a new information race between the two nations, as they both try to master quantum teleportation so as to gain the upper hand when it comes to modern data encryption techniques.

So whilst quantum teleportation may not be the cool teleporter technology we’ve come to expect thanks to our science fiction shows, it could still turn out to be one of the most important technological advancements of the next decade. Especially as the world becomes more and more reliant on continuously available secure lines of communication.