Quantum teleportation

Greetings dear friends.

Earlier this year a team of scientists succeeded for the first time in teleporting quantum information to a destination located 44 km away with 90% accuracy.

Teleportation is already here, but it is not as we imagined it. Source: @emiliomoron, contains public domain image.

Although science fiction movies have accustomed us to the idea of teleportation, a term that refers to the transfer of physical objects between two distant points, quantum teleportation is a technique in which quantum information is transmitted from a point of origin to a destination point located at a certain distance.

The quantum information transmitted is known as a qubit, the quantum analog of the bit. These qubits act like particles that remain suspended in a series of possible states, just as bits have two possible states (1 and 0), qubits are like dice spinning in the air, the identity of each is not defined until they fall; but in this system, although each can fall on any number, both are guaranteed to add up to seven no matter how far one falls from the other; thus, data from one place instantaneously reflects data from another.

Quantum teleportation was first performed in 2004 for photons, managing to teleport the quantum state of a photon to a crystal located 6 km away by means of optical fiber, later it could be extended to other systems such as atoms and electrons. So, we are really talking about the transmission of quantum states from one location to another, thanks to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, a force that allows two entangled particles to remain united, that is, despite the distance that separates them, two entangled particles remain correlated and are able to share information, one instantly replicates what happens in the other.

By a suitable arrangement of three particles, it is possible to force the state of a particle to adopt the state of its entangled partner. Source: @emiliomoron.

As presented in the journal PRX Quantum Quantum, the team of scientists managed to transmit quantum information super-fast and with a high level of fidelity, and to send their quantum information they used a fiber optic network very similar to those that form our Internet networks. And about the latter, through the transmission of these quantum qubits, the scientists are convinced that they can create a computer network that allows sharing information almost instantaneously, securely and with high precision, that is, a quantum internet.

This super-fast transmission of information has been called the quantum Internet. Source: pxhere.com.

Although scientists say that quantum entanglement is still a very complex science, they are also confident that each experiment like this one brings them closer to the construction of such an Internet network, which in addition to offering greater speed would allow the transmission of greater volumes of data over longer distances and with much greater data security, so it is not difficult to imagine how many applications a super-fast connection like this would have.

On the other hand, we could see the birth of a new technological sector, since all our devices that use the traditional internet encode data in zeros or ones, but through the quantum internet the information would be composed of zeros and ones superimposed simultaneously. This would require all the infrastructure to support this type of internet, such as repeaters and routers among other devices.

The truth is that despite the complexity of the process, there are many researchers trying to make this ultrafast Internet network a reality, and with the results obtained in the aforementioned research, we may be very close to seeing a quantum revolution in the field of communications.

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