Science Fiction or Reality? The teleportation of High Dimensional Quantum Sates

Quantum entanglement is arguably the most mind-boggling phenomena in quantum physics. Or as Erwin Schrödinger puts it: “quantum entanglement is not one, but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics”. Entanglement not only fascinates physicists, since it is the basic ingredient of a very famous mechanism, namely quantum teleportation. Teleportation or more famously “beaming” has been popularized in the science fiction series Star Trek. There, Scotty regularly beamed Kirk and his colleagues to remote planets. Although we are still quite far away from the dream of even teleporting a single quantum particle intact, I will present our latest results from the lab about the realization of quantum teleportation in high-dimensions. Starting from the simple but genius theoretical ideas from the 90s, I will explain our new experimental concept and the technological difficulties that we had to overcome in this project. In addition to the philosophically appealing goal of teleporting a complete quantum particle intact, I will also discuss possible implications and applications for future quantum technologies, especially regarding quantum key distribution networks and quantum repeaters.