Teleporting a person or object from one place to another remains firmly in the realm of science fiction, with no serious scientific pathway to make it happen. What scientists have achieved, and are rapidly advancing, is quantum teleportation: the instant transfer of information between two linked particles, no matter how far apart they are. It’s not moving matter. It’s moving the quantum state of a particle to another particle somewhere else, effectively recreating its exact properties at a distance. That distinction matters enormously, and the progress on the information side is genuinely remarkable.
What Quantum Teleportation Actually Does
Quantum teleportation exploits a phenomenon called entanglement, where two particles become linked so that measuring one instantly affects the other, regardless of distance. To teleport information, researchers prepare a pair of entangled particles and send one to each location. They then perform a special measurement on the particle whose state they want to transfer, along with one half of the entangled pair. The result of that measurement is sent (at normal speed, through a regular communication channel) to the receiving end, where it’s used to reconstruct the original quantum state on the second entangled particle.
The original particle’s state is destroyed in the process, which satisfies a fundamental rule of quantum mechanics: you can’t copy a quantum state. You can only move it. And because the measurement result still has to travel through a conventional channel, nothing moves faster than light. The “teleportation” part is that the quantum state reappears at the destination without ever physically traveling through the space in between.
Where the Technology Stands Today
In 2024, researchers successfully teleported a quantum state of light through more than 30 kilometers of standard fiber optic cable, and they did it while regular internet traffic was flowing through the same cable. That was considered impossible not long ago, and it’s a significant milestone because it means quantum teleportation doesn’t necessarily require dedicated, custom-built infrastructure. It could potentially piggyback on the fiber optic networks already crisscrossing the globe.
Researchers have also moved beyond the simplest unit of quantum information (the qubit, which holds a 0 or 1 in superposition) to successfully teleporting qutrits, which hold three states simultaneously. That’s a meaningful jump in complexity, and teams are already working on four-level systems and higher. The more complex the quantum state you can reliably teleport, the more useful the technology becomes for real-world computing and communication.
On the infrastructure side, the Fermilab-led Illinois Express Quantum Network is building a metropolitan-scale testbed connecting two Department of Energy national labs, Northwestern University, and Caltech. It’s designed to support multiple users, coexist with traditional internet traffic on the same fiber, and be flexible enough to incorporate new hardware like quantum memory and repeaters as those technologies mature.
What It’s Good For
The practical payoff of quantum teleportation is secure communication. Because measuring a quantum state destroys it, any attempt to intercept a quantum-teleported message would be immediately detectable. This makes quantum networks theoretically immune to eavesdropping, which is a big deal for governments, banks, and anyone handling sensitive data.
The other major application is distributed quantum computing. Individual quantum computers are powerful but physically limited in size. If you can teleport quantum states reliably between separate machines, you can link them together into a much larger system. Think of it as networking quantum computers the way we network classical ones today, except the connection itself operates on quantum principles.
The Biggest Obstacles
The core problem is decoherence. Quantum states are extraordinarily fragile. Any interaction with the surrounding environment, whether it’s heat, vibration, or stray electromagnetic fields, can cause entangled particles to lose their connection. This is the quantum equivalent of signal loss, and it gets worse over longer distances. Environmental noise causes qubits to slip into undefined states, corrupting the information before it arrives.
Over short distances, this is manageable. Over hundreds or thousands of kilometers, it’s a serious barrier. Classical internet signals can be amplified by repeaters along the way, but quantum signals can’t be copied or amplified without destroying them. Quantum repeaters, which would refresh entanglement at intervals along a network, are still in early development. Without them, long-distance quantum teleportation remains limited to line-of-sight satellite links or relatively short stretches of fiber.
Fidelity is another challenge. The measurement process at the heart of teleportation succeeds reliably only about half the time using standard optical equipment. Researchers recently demonstrated a technique using extra “helper” photons to push success rates above that 50% ceiling, but getting teleportation to work with near-perfect reliability at scale is still an open engineering problem.
Realistic Timelines
IBM and Cisco announced in late 2025 that they aim to build the foundation of a “quantum internet” by the late 2030s. Their first goal is a proof-of-concept demonstration before the end of 2030, showing that qubits from two separate quantum machines in distinct physical environments can be entangled. From there, they envision a network of thousands of distributed quantum machines, though they acknowledge the plan involves a lot of very big “ifs.”
A functional quantum network for secure communication could realistically emerge within the next 10 to 15 years, initially connecting a handful of cities or research institutions. Something resembling a true quantum internet, where quantum information moves as freely as classical data does today, is likely further out, perhaps mid-century if the engineering challenges around repeaters and error correction are solved.
Why Matter Teleportation Is a Different Problem Entirely
Quantum teleportation moves the information describing a particle’s state. Teleporting an actual object, even a single atom, would require capturing the complete quantum state of every particle in that object, transmitting all of it, and reconstructing the object from different matter at the destination. A human body contains roughly 7 octillion atoms (7 followed by 27 zeros), each with its own quantum state. The amount of information involved is so far beyond current or foreseeable technology that no credible research program is working toward it.
There’s also a philosophical wrinkle. Because quantum teleportation destroys the original state, “teleporting” a person would mean disintegrating the original and building a copy elsewhere. Whether that copy is the same person is a question physics can’t answer.
So the honest answer: we are making rapid, genuine progress toward teleporting quantum information across useful distances, with real applications in security and computing on the horizon. Teleporting matter, in any form a person would recognize from science fiction, is not on any scientific roadmap.