Teleportation
Mostly associated with Star Trek, teleportation was a solution to both budgetary and story-pacing complications of creating a science-fiction television series. The alternative would have been to rely almost exclusively on the use of small-crafts to land on planets or board other ships. Utilitizing teleporters was much less inexpensive, as it mostly made use of a single set and special effect. It also sped up the pacing of the stories, as characters could instantly get to where they needed to be.
Most use of teleporters outside Star Trek are similar in nature or borrow heavily from concepts developed within the franchise.
Pitfalls of using teleporters
The idea behind the teleporter is that it essentially makes a copy of yourself, which it recreates at the destination while destroying the original copy. This brings up all sorts of philosophical complications. Does the teleporter actually kill the person who uses it? Is the copy a newly born lifeform with the same memories of the original?
Another issue involves the matter of the teleported being's memories. A complication of quantum physics called the observer effect states that at the quantum level, observing a particle (such as an electron) changes that phenomenon. This means, for example, that recording the position of an electron could change its momentum. Considering that the inner workings of the animal brain rely heavily upon the movements of electrons, the act of the teleporter observing the positions and momentums of these electrons would change them, leaving the copy of the teleporting being with a potentially very scrambled brain, which could result in confusion at best and brain damage at worst.
The observer effect is often confused or conflated with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and in order to explain away some of the quantum issues of teleportation, the writer's came up with an in-world device called the Heisenberg compensator to counteract this particular pitfall.