Teleportation has quietly shifted from pure fantasy to a working laboratory tool, and the latest experiments are starting to spill out of physics labs into real-world networks. The headline breakthroughs are not about people vanishing in a shimmer of light, but about information, photons and quantum bits hopping between chips, fibers and memories without crossing the space in between. The question now is not whether teleportation works, but how far this strange new capability can scale, and what that really means for the idea of moving humans.
To understand whether people could ever be next, I have to separate the hype from the hardware. The recent wave of results, from Chinese fiber networks to semiconductor chips and solid-state memories, shows a consistent pattern: teleportation is becoming more practical, more robust and more integrated with existing infrastructure. Yet every one of these advances also underlines a hard limit, that what moves is quantum information, not matter itself, and that the cost of scaling from a single photon to a human body is almost unimaginably high.
What scientists actually mean by “teleportation”
When physicists talk about teleportation, they are not describing a person or an object disappearing in one place and reappearing intact somewhere else. They are talking about transferring the exact quantum state of one system to another, typically using a pair of entangled particles and a carefully choreographed measurement. In this process, the original state is destroyed at the source and reconstructed at the destination, so what travels is information about how a particle was configured, not the particle itself.
The mechanism hinges on entanglement, where two or more particles share a linked fate so that measuring one instantly determines the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are. In practical teleportation protocols, a third particle is used so that its state can be encoded, measured and then effectively “handed off” to the entangled partners, which is why experts describe a third particle that instantly teleports its state to two entangled particles as the key enabler of these schemes, a process that has been explored in detail in work on teleporting humans as a thought experiment.
The new experiment that pushed teleportation into real networks
The most eye-catching recent result is not a single lab bench demonstration, but a real-world test that pushed quantum teleportation across existing communication infrastructure. In a stunning leap for science, Chinese researchers have reported that they achieved quantum teleportation across fiber networks, showing that fragile quantum states can be transmitted alongside ordinary data traffic without being instantly scrambled. This is a crucial step, because it suggests teleportation can be layered onto the same kind of cables that already carry global internet traffic, instead of requiring exotic, dedicated links.
What stands out in this Chinese work is not just the physics, but the engineering discipline behind it. The team had to manage losses, noise and timing across long distances, and still demonstrate that the teleported states preserved their quantum nature and correlations. By proving that teleportation can operate across fiber networks that resemble commercial backbones, the Chinese group has effectively turned a once esoteric protocol into a candidate building block for long-distance quantum systems, a point underscored in descriptions of how Chinese researchers integrated their experiment with fiber infrastructure.
Teleportation over the internet, not just in the lab
Running teleportation over a controlled fiber loop is one thing, but sending quantum states alongside live internet traffic is another level of difficulty. Earlier this year, a team reported that they had achieved quantum teleportation over the internet for the first time, carefully studying how light is scattered in fiber and placing their photons at a judicial point where that scattering mechanism could be tamed. The experiment showed that quantum signals could coexist with an actual internet stream, rather than requiring a pristine, isolated channel.
The researchers did not simply bolt a quantum link onto the side of the network, they wove it into a unified fiber optic infrastructure and then tested it repeatedly to confirm that the teleported states survived. Each test suggested that the protocol was robust enough to be a realistic ingredient in future communication systems, and the work has been described as quantum teleportation over the internet that piggybacks on existing infrastructure. A related report framed this as quantum teleportation achieved over internet for the first time, emphasizing that the same unified fiber optic infrastructure carried both classical and quantum information, a detail highlighted in coverage of Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over Internet For The First Time.
From chips to solid memory, teleportation is getting hardware-friendly
Teleportation is also moving closer to the hardware that will eventually power quantum devices in homes, data centers and defense systems. Scientists have reported the first-ever quantum teleportation between separate semiconductor chips, a milestone that shows how entanglement and state transfer can be integrated directly into the platforms used for conventional computing. In that work, Scientists demonstrated that quantum information could hop between chips without a direct physical link, a result that Shy Cohen described as a foundation for scalable quantum networks built from modular components.
This chip-to-chip breakthrough matters because it aligns teleportation with the semiconductor industry’s existing manufacturing ecosystem, instead of confining it to bulky optical tables. The experiment is being treated as one of the building blocks for quantum networks that could eventually connect processors, sensors and memories, and the report on how Scientists achieve first-ever quantum teleportation between separate semiconductor chips makes clear that this is about architecture as much as physics. It suggests a future where teleportation is a routine internal operation inside quantum hardware, not a standalone stunt.
Locking teleported states into solid memory
Another key step is learning how to store teleported quantum information reliably, rather than letting it vanish as soon as it arrives. Researchers have now successfully teleported a quantum bit of light at telecom wavelengths to a solid-state quantum memory, effectively catching a flying photon and preserving its state inside a material system. At a Glance, the experiment showed that the teleported qubit retained its quantum nature and high effectiveness, which is essential if teleportation is to support real communication or computation rather than one-off demonstrations.
What makes this result stand out is the combination of telecom wavelengths, which are compatible with existing fiber networks, and a solid memory that can hold the state long enough to be useful. The team behind this work emphasized that their approach could be scaled and integrated with other components, and the detailed description of how Researchers teleported a quantum bit of light into a solid-state memory, as well as the broader discussion in the full report on quantum teleportation to solid memory, both underline that storage is now catching up with transmission. Together with chip-to-chip and fiber experiments, this points toward end-to-end teleportation pipelines that can send, receive and hold quantum states on demand.
Why this matters for encryption and national security
Even if no one is teleporting people, the ability to move quantum states intact has immediate consequences for security and geopolitics. A research team from the University of Stuttgart in Germany has demonstrated teleportation protocols that are directly relevant to unhackable encryption, using entangled photons to create keys that cannot be intercepted without leaving a detectable trace. In that work, the University of Stuttgart group in Germany showed how teleportation-based schemes could underpin quantum key distribution, where any eavesdropping attempt would disturb the quantum correlations and alert the legitimate users.
These kinds of experiments are not just academic curiosities, they are being watched closely by governments and defense contractors that see quantum-secure communication as a strategic asset. The same physics that lets a photon’s state be teleported between nodes can be used to distribute encryption keys that are provably secure under the laws of quantum mechanics, and the description of how a research team from the University of Stuttgart in Germany linked teleportation to unhackable encryption makes that connection explicit. As these systems mature, they could reshape how militaries, banks and critical infrastructure operators think about secure links, long before any science fiction style transporter pad appears.
How far is this from teleporting a human being?
With teleportation now happening between chips, memories and network nodes, it is tempting to ask whether a person could ever be moved the same way. The blunt answer, based on current evidence, is that human teleportation remains firmly in the realm of speculation. Quantum teleportation protocols operate on individual particles or small groups of qubits, and scaling them up to the roughly 1028 atoms in a human body would require an astronomical amount of information, as well as a way to measure and transmit every relevant quantum state without destroying the person in the process.
There is also a conceptual hurdle that goes beyond engineering. Teleportation as physicists practice it destroys the original state when it is measured, so a human-scale teleporter would, in effect, have to disassemble the original person down to their quantum degrees of freedom and then reconstruct them elsewhere. That raises profound questions about identity and continuity that are explored in discussions of whether teleporting humans is science fiction or fact, including the analysis that treats such a device as a tool to tackle seemingly impossible challenges while acknowledging that the underlying protocol relies on a third particle that teleports its state to entangled partners, as described in the work on teleporting humans. Unverified based on available sources is any claim that a human-scale teleporter is under development or that such a system is close to realization.
What the experts say is actually possible next
When I look at the trajectory of the field, the near-term future of teleportation is not about people, but about building out quantum networks that link sensors, computers and memories into a new kind of internet. The U.S. National Science Foundation has framed teleportation as a proven capability in the quantum world, noting that experiments have already shown state transfer between photons and that similar techniques could also be possible between electrons. In that view, the realistic next steps involve extending teleportation to more types of particles and integrating it with practical devices, rather than leaping straight to macroscopic objects.
Experts also stress that teleportation is one tool among many in the quantum engineering toolbox, and that its most powerful applications may come from combining it with error correction, entanglement swapping and advanced materials. The NSF’s discussion of how Yes, teleportation is possible in the quantum world emphasizes that the key is controlling and preserving quantum states, whether in photons, electrons or other systems. If the recent Chinese fiber experiments, the University of Stuttgart encryption work, the semiconductor chip teleportation and the solid-state memory results are any guide, the next decade is likely to be defined by a quiet revolution in how information moves, not by people stepping into teleportation booths.
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