Teleportation may have been beamed one step closer to reality after Indian physicists suggested a theory that could be used to make two particles behave as one, no matter how far apart they are.

Reported this week in New Scientist, Sougato Bose and Dipankar Home, of the Bose Institute in Calcutta, announced a breakthrough in a method that could be used to 'entangle' particles, or what Einstein once described as "spooky action at a distance".

Quantum entanglement allows two atoms to behave as one, and could theoretically be used to teleport objects by transferring the properties of one atom to another.

A beam splitter is used to send two identical electrons down either of two paths, with an equal probability that the electrons will go down both paths or the same path.

Bose and Home have shown that if one electron is detected on each path, they become entangled. "One of the advances we have made is that these two particles could be from completely independent sources," Bose was quoted as saying.

Bose and Home reckon the technique could be applied to any object, atoms, molecules, and maybe something bigger.

Last year Danish boffins at the University of Aarhus made a breakthrough on a similar level, when Eugene Polzik and his colleagues made two samples of several trillion atoms interact at a distance.