Not virtual, it s reality
the dream of science-fiction writers that an object could vanish at one place and reappear instantaneously at another, seems to have come true. Scientists have been able to demonstrate a form of teleportation in a tabletop experiment. Teleporation is a process in which an object disintegrates in one place and reassembles in another. Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, caused a photon (a particle of light) to disappear at one point and reappear instantly at another point a few metres away.
The process did not require any physical connection or form of communication between the two points. After this achievement, researchers now wonder whether the technique could also be applied to teleport objects as observed on Captain Kirk's starship "Enterprise' in Star Trek.
Charles Bennett, one of the six theorists who predicted the teleportation effect four years ago, however, says that it would be extremely difficult to teleport even an object as small as a bacterium. But Zeilinger is hopeful that the process could be used to develop large sophisticated "quantum computers' and encrypting messages. Encrypting is a process to convert messages into codes in order to prevent unauthorised access.
The researchers teleported a quantum state of one photon to another. To be more specific, they teleported a particular portion of photon. Photon possesses dual properties as it can be in wave form and also in particle form. The method employed by the researchers to teleport the photon was based on two characteristics of quantum mechanics