teleportation experiment

Scientists achieve reliable quantum teleportation for first time

Einstein is wrong? That's the potential outcome of a quantum mechanics study as scientists race to disprove his views on entanglement.

Albert Einstein once told a friend that quantum mechanics doesn't hold water in his scientific world view because "physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance." That spooky action at a distance is entanglement , a quantum phenomenon in which two particles, separated by any amount of distance, can instantaneously affect one another as if part of a unified system.

Now, scientists have successfully hijacked that quantum weirdness -- doing so reliably for the first time -- to produce what many sci-fi fans have long dreamt up: teleportation. No, not beaming humans aboard the USS Enterprise, but the teleportation of data.

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, part of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, report that they sent quantum data concerning the spin state of an electron to another electron about 10 feet away. Quantum teleportation has been recorded in the past, but the results in this study have an unprecedented replication rate of 100 percent at the current distance, the team said.

Thanks to the strange properties of entanglement, this allows for that data -- only quantum data, not classical information like messages or even simple bits -- to be teleported seemingly faster than the speed of light. The news was reported first by The New York Times on Thursday , following the publication of a paper in the journal Science .

Proving Einstein wrong about the purview and completeness of quantum mechanics is not just an academic boasting contest. Proving the existence of entanglement and teleportation -- and getting experiments to work efficiently, in larger systems and at greater distances -- holds the key to translating quantum mechanics to practical applications, like quantum computing. For instance, quantum computers could utilize that speed to unlock a whole new generation of unprecedented computing power.

Quantum teleportation is not teleportation in the sense one might think. It involves achieving a certain set of parameters that then allow properties of one quantum system to get tangled up with another so that observations are reflected simultaneously, thereby "teleporting" the information from one place to another.

To do this, researchers at Delft first had to create qubits out of classical bits, in this case electrons trapped in diamonds at extremely low temperatures that allow their quantum properties, like spin, to be observed.

A qubit is a unit of quantum data that can hold multiple values simultaneously thanks to an equally integral quantum phenomenon called superposition, a term fans of the field will accurately associate with the Schrödinger equation , as well as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that says something exists in all possible states until it is observed. It's the same way quantum computing may one day surpass the speeds of classical computing by allowing calculations to spread bit values between 0, 1 or any probabilistic value between the two numbers -- in other words, a superposition of both figures.

With quibits separated by a distance of three meters, the researchers were able to observe and record the spin of one electron and see that reflected in the other qubit instantly. It's an admittedly wonky conception of data teleportation that requires a little head scratching before it begins to clear up.

Still, its effects could be far reaching. The researchers are attempting to increase that distance to more than a kilometer, which would be ample leeway to test whether or not entanglement was a consistent phenomenon and that the information was traveling faster than the speed of light. Such experiments would more definitively knock down Einstein's disqualification of entanglement due to its violation of classical mechanics.

"There is a big race going on between five or six groups to prove Einstein wrong," Ronald Hanson, a physicist leading the research at Delft, told The New York Times. "There is one very big fish."

Update at 10:08 p.m. PT: Added photos from Delft University and the research team's explanatory YouTube video.

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• Published: 01 December 1997

Experimental quantum teleportation

• Dik Bouwmeester 1 ,
• Jian-Wei Pan 1 ,
• Klaus Mattle 1 ,
• Manfred Eibl 1 ,
• Harald Weinfurter 1 &
• Anton Zeilinger 1  

Nature volume  390 ,  pages 575–579 ( 1997 ) Cite this article

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Quantum teleportation — the transmission and reconstruction over arbitrary distances of the state of a quantum system — is demonstrated experimentally. During teleportation, an initial photon which carries the polarization that is to be transferred and one of a pair of entangled photons are subjected to a measurement such that the second photon of the entangled pair acquires the polarization of the initial photon. This latter photon can be arbitrarily far away from the initial one. Quantum teleportation will be a critical ingredient for quantum computation networks.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Bennett, I. Cirac, J. Rarity, W. Wootters and P. Zoller for discussions, and M. Zukowski for suggestions about various aspects of the experiments. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation FWF, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the TMR program of the European Union and the US NSF.

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Bouwmeester, D., Pan, JW., Mattle, K. et al. Experimental quantum teleportation. Nature 390 , 575–579 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/37539

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Significant new discovery in teleportation research: Noise can improve the quality of quantum teleportation

by University of Turku

Researchers have succeeded in conducting an almost perfect quantum teleportation despite the presence of noise that usually disrupts the transfer of quantum state. The results have been published in the journal Science Advances .

In teleportation, the state of a quantum particle, or qubit, is transferred from one location to another without sending the particle itself. This transfer requires quantum resources, such as entanglement between an additional pair of qubits.

In an ideal case, the transfer and teleportation of the qubit state can be done perfectly. However, real-world systems are vulnerable to noise and disturbances—and this reduces and limits the quality of the teleportation.

Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, and the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, have now proposed a theoretical idea and made corresponding experiments to overcome this problem. In other words, the new approach enables reaching high-quality teleportation despite the presence of noise.

"The work is based on an idea of distributing entanglement—prior to running the teleportation protocol—beyond the used qubits, i.e., exploiting the hybrid entanglement between different physical degrees of freedom," says Professor Jyrki Piilo from the University of Turku.

Conventionally, the polarization of photons has been used for the entanglement of qubits in teleportation, while the current approach exploits the hybrid entanglement between the photons' polarization and frequency.

"This allows for a significant change in how the noise influences the protocol, and as a matter of fact our discovery reverses the role of the noise from being harmful to being beneficial to teleportation," Piilo says.

With conventional qubit entanglement in the presence of noise, the teleportation protocol does not work. In a case where there is initially hybrid entanglement and no noise, the teleportation does not work either.

"However, when we have hybrid entanglement and add noise, the teleportation and quantum state transfer occur in almost perfect manner," says Dr. Olli Siltanen whose doctoral dissertation presented the theoretical part of the current research.

In general, the discovery enables almost ideal teleportation despite the presence of certain type of noise when using photons for teleportation.

"While we have done numerous experiments on different facets of quantum physics with photons in our laboratory, it was very thrilling and rewarding to see this very challenging teleportation experiment successfully completed," says Dr. Zhao-Di Liu from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.

"This is a significant proof-of-principle experiment in the context of one of the most important quantum protocols," says Professor Chuan-Feng Li from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.

Teleportation has important applications, e.g., in transmitting quantum information , and it is of utmost importance to have approaches that protect this transmission from noise and can be used for other quantum applications.

The results of the current study can be considered as basic research that carries significant fundamental importance and opens intriguing pathways for future work to extend the approach to general types of noise sources and other quantum protocols.

Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by University of Turku

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