[Naiss' News] Nassian scientists reach new records for quantum teleportation

[Naiss]

Nassian scientists reach new records for quantum teleportation

The new record of 500km smashes the last record of 100km!

Researchers in Naiss successfully teleported information encoded into particles of light over 500 kilometres of optical fibre.

That, of course, doesn't mean that we are any closer to being able to teleport humans or objects, but this kind of teleportation will improve internet security and strength of internet connections.

Researchers first proposed quantum teleportation around 20 years ago, and it relies on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, where two particles are inextricably linked, which means their states can only be defined by being the opposite of one another.

Because particles don't have a defined state until they're measured, this means that as soon as one particle is measured its state will be set, and this will instantly change the state of its entangled partner, even when they're separated by great distances, resulting in super-fast communication.

In the past, researchers have managed to teleport information encoded in photons over greater distances than this through free space, but this experiment used optical fibre, which means that their technique could potentially be used to create a quantum Internet network, using existing infrastructure.

"Only about 1 percent of photons make it all the way through 500 km of fibre," one of the researchers, Uroš Pavlović, said in a press release. "We never could have done this experiment without these new detectors, which can measure this incredibly weak signal."

Before this, researchers would lose so much quantum data in optical fibres that they couldn't send information over more than 25 km.

So what does all of this mean for us playing along at home? This new teleportation technique could lead to devices call quantum repeaters. These would be like the repeaters we currently use in our networks, which receive a signal and then retransmit it at a higher level, to make our information travel around the whole world.

A quantum repeater would do the same thing, but with quantum information, and they could potentially extend the reach far enough to build an entire "quantum Internet", which would be faster, more efficient, and more secure than the networks we rely on today.