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Purely speculative. If not allowed, I'll delete.

If quantum teleportation was scalable to macroscopic objects, I assume it would require an amount of matter at the destination, equal to the amount of matter of the origin object... since we're duplicating quantum states, and not actually transporting matter. Is this true?

If this is the case, is there some kind of material at the destination site that would be suitable... some kind of general purpose material that would be ideally suited for altering to match the origin object?

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    $\begingroup$ Yes, quantum teleportation is "quantum state teleportation". With anything resembling technology within the reach of physics today, one can't teleport the state of a macroscopic object to the extent allowed by nature. OTOH, it's also completely irrelevant, the quantum state of macroscopic objects completely decoheres on microscopic time scales. Everything you see around you is essentially in a quasi-classical thermal state that can be replicated with something like a molecular 3d-printer. $\endgroup$
    – CuriousOne
    Commented May 5, 2016 at 1:25

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Quantum teleportation is a concept of transferring quantum states of matter. Not teleporting matter itself.

To "clone" an object to the destination, you need to have the same material as the object already prepared at the destination. You can teleport the state of the object to the destination (of course, purely talking in theory). Then you may be able to use the information of state of the object to prepare the material at the destiny in the same state. That way, you can teleport an object to the destination. If you want to find a proper "material" for this operation, I don't think there is one suitable for general purpose, because whatever you want to teleport, ideally you have to prepare the same material at the destination -- not another material. If you want to know what material is easier to teleport, the simplest hydrogen atom or molecule would be a good candidate.

However, the teleportation technique researchers have been playing with usually refers to "degrees of freedom" of quantum states. In that sense, you can teleport a spin-1/2 state of a nuclear of a carbon atom in an organic molecule to a spin-1/2 state of a nuclear of a hydrogen atom in another environment. See here, for example. As more degrees of freedom of quantum states joined together, it becomes exponentially harder to implement. This is because the "space" of the full quantum states to fully describe the state of the system increases exponentially as the degree of freedom increases. To measure such a state without destroying the other degrees of freedom will become very hard as well, not to mention to prepare such a complex state in real life. A sad thing is that after measuring the state of the original object, people usually think the state of the original object is destroyed. In other words, you cannot clone a quantum state to another object without destroying it unless you have some pre-knowledge of the state before measuring and teleportation. Most of current teleportation technique implemented in labs are still only working on atomic level, not to a macroscopic object yet. But hopefully new techniques will eventually help us reach something big!

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    $\begingroup$ So this phenomenon really has no potential (even in theory) for transporting macroscopic objects (ie: food or medical supplies to some remote location), since materials need to be prepared in advance at the destination. Really wish the word 'teleportation' had never been used for this phenomenon. $\endgroup$ Commented May 5, 2016 at 6:16

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