The distance record for quantum teleportationMovie Camera has been smashed. Juan Yin and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui, teleported a quantum state 97 kilometres, 81 km further than the previous record.

Yin’s team entangle photons – which links their properties even when the photons are separated. Then they beam one photon from each entangled pair to a point A and the other to B.

When a photon is changed at A, the particle at B also changes. No information passes from A to B, but the photon change can be used to partially encode quantum bits, called qubits. Rather like a letter that can’t be opened, these can only be reconstructed at B using additional data communicated conventionally from point A, so information is not being sent faster than light.