In the November study, the researchers successfully “beamed” polarization between a photon pair, and they could do this because the particles were entangled.
Equating quantum (information) teleportation with physical teleportation of objects really just reveals that the author has no idea what they’re talking about.
Sadly very typical for science journalists.
But is quantum Tele even useful
At the moment it’s experimental, so no.
And just to be clear, this cannot be used to move information faster than the speed of light, ever.
In theory it might have application as a sort of tamper-evident seal for digital encryption.
And just to be clear, this cannot be used to move information faster than the speed of light, ever.
Why not?
The people who named it “quantum teleportation” had in mind Star Trek teleporters which work by “scanning” the object, destroying it, and then beaming the scanned information to another location where it is then reconstructed.
Quantum teleportation is basically an algorithm that performs a destructive measurement (kind of like “scanning”) of the quantum state of one qubit and then sends the information over a classical communication channel (could even be a beam if you wanted) to another party which can then use that information to reconstruct the quantum state on another qubit.
The point is that there is still the “beaming” step, i.e. you still have to send the measurement information over a classical channel, which cannot exceed the speed of light.
But this is about quantum entanglement isn’t it?
If you have a very noisy quantum communication channel, you can combine a second algorithm called quantum distillation with quantum teleportation to effectively bypass the quantum communication channel and send a qubit over a classical communication channel. That is the main utility I see for it. Basically, very useful for transmitting qubits over a noisy quantum network.
