Teleportation was first seen happening in Star Trek, a television drama series, and it may soon become reality as some German scientists have taken inspiration from the science-fiction drama to develop a similar technology that makes the idea appear practical. The team of scientists has successfully used laser beams to teleport technical language without traversing properties of energy or matter.

Alexander Szameit, Ph.D from the University of Jena in Germany, was leading the team who thought to give teleportation a try after realizing that most of the technologies that we use presently were introduced through reel even before their invention. Their concept to experiment with theory of teleportation was based on properties of elementary particles.

The theory is named quantum teleportation. It means teleportation of data is in the form of electrons and light particles, which has been in discussion for long but never experimented. However, the German scientists didn’t not just experiment, but also succeed in their attempt to teleport the particles of electrons and light.

“Elementary particles such as electrons and light particles exist per se in a spatially delocalized state. Within such a system spread across multiple locations, it is possible to transmit information from one location to another without any loss of time”, said Szameit. The potential benefit of teleportation on becoming reality will be huge to telecommunication and transportation technology.

To conduct the experiment, the scientists first encoded data to be transported into a specific polarization direction of the laser light. Following this they transmitted the information through to the shape of the laser beam through a form of teleportation. The result was an instant transmission. However, such a system is only feasible locally for being a classical teleportation method.