Scientists teleport images in ‘Star Trek’ discovery

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “Traditionally, two communicating parties physically send the information from one to the other, even in the quantum realm,” said Andrew Forbes, a professor at Wits University who led the research. “Now, it’s possible to teleport information so that it never physically travels across the connection – a ‘Star Trek’ technology made real.” The achievement offers a glimpse at the potential of quantum communications, an emerging field of science that could allow data to be sent across distances far greater than modern telecommunication systems currently offer. “We have to be cautious now, as this configuration could not prevent a cheating sender from keeping better copies of the information to be teleported, which means we could end up with many Mr Spock clones in the Star Trek world if that is what Scotty wanted,” said Dr Adam Vallés from ICFO, who was one of the leads on the project. “We hope that this experiment showing the feasibility of the process motivates further advances in the nonlinear optics community through pushing the limits towards a full quantum implementation.” The research was published in a study titled ‘Quantum transport of high-dimensional spatial information with a nonlinear detector’, which appeared in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications.