Quantum teleportation is the mystical, far-off in the future idea where quantum information encoded into particles of light can be transferred from one place to another remotely. Except it’s not far-off in the future — it just happened. Teleportation is real and it is here.
The teleportation occurred over several kilometres of optical fibre networks in the cities of Hefei in China and Calgary in Canada.
The two independent studies show that quantum teleportation across metropolitan networks is technologically feasible, and pave the way towards future city-scale quantum technologies and communications networks, such as a quantum internet.
Quantum teleportation over fibre optic networks has the potential to greatly improve the security and strength of internet connections. However, long-distance quantum teleportation using a fibre network requires independent light sources, and this presents a technological challenge: the light beam from one source needs to remain indistinguishable to the light beam from the other source after travelling through several kilometres of fibre that is laid through a changing environment.
To overcome this, the research groups independently developed several feedback and synchronisation mechanisms to enable their teleportation experiments.
Qiang Zhang, Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues implemented their field test in Hefei, China and used light at a telecommunication wavelength (as used in current telecommunications networks) to minimise the rate at which the signal light loses intensity in the fibre.
Wolfgang Tittel and colleagues conducted their test in Calgary, Canada, but used photons at both a telecommunication wavelength and a wavelength of 795 nm, which allowed their quantum teleportation experiment to run faster than Zhang, Pan and colleagues’ experiment, but at a reduced fidelity.
So together, we have photons both retaining light, and travelling fast. This is super exciting. These studies will now form the basis of further experiments, and bring us even closer to that elusive dream of teleportation of matter. Well, that’s my dream, anyway. Even if we aren’t made of quantum information encoded into particles of light. Yeah, that might be a stumbling block.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo
Comments
13 responses to “Quantum Teleportation Is Now A Thing”
Teleport me to work so I don’t have to brave the rain !!! D:
I have a 1.5hr commute each way each day so Amen to that!
You do not want teleportation at all.
Now feel free to live in the horror of contemplation of your own mortality.
We can already do that when we go to bed at night!
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3546
Welp, that just broke my brain. Thanks though, I love this sort of stuff!
So it was light signals traveling through fibre optic cable? What part used quantum teleportation?
I’d be wary of this. A significant percent of the papers coming out of China a BS.
Thanks Joe
It was probably an extension of this quantum entanglement based photon teleportation. http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/open-air-quantum-teleportation-performed-across-a-97km-lake/
This seems like a flawed or short sighted upgrade for information transportation, the real future method will be quantum entangled communications, no cable or light needed, just control of paired particles (which atm only last for a second, but that is improving).
Yes quantum entangled particle communication does mean you can be anywhere in the galaxy to phone home in real time back to Earth :), I’m not so sure if it would work between galaxies however because of differences in laws of physics….
Quantum teleportation has been around for a while now. Last year they successfully teleported over 25km in the US.
Any time I see any story Quantum Physics-related, I feel the need to share this around:
It’s actually been here for about 4 years now, the problem is you needed high precision alignment of sender/receiver and open space. It’s cool they’re now doing it with optical fibre.