Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time, the journal Nature reports.
The feat was achieved by two teams of researchers working independently on the problem in the US and Austria. The ability to transfer key properties of one particle to another without using any physical link has until now only been achieved with laser light.
Experts say being able to do the same with massive particles like atoms could lead to new superfast computers. When physicists talk about "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of "quantum states" between separate atoms.
These would be such things as an atom's energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties.
And in the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines.