S.cientists have demonstrated quantum teleportation – the sending of small units of quantum information known as qubits – for the first time ever.
The qubits were transferred over 27 miles and moving faster than the speed of light.
Scientists hope that this ‘quantum’ teleportation‘could be completely bring about a revolution how computers work.
Quantum communication systems are said to be faster and more secure than the usual internet networks that currently exist.
The breakthrough was achieved by a group led by Caltech, with experts from Fermilab, AT&T, Harvard University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Calgary.
“This is a significant achievement towards building a technology that will redefine the way we conduct global communications.”
The study, which was shared in PRX Quantum, said the ‘teleportation’ was instantaneous – in fact it was even faster than the speed of light – and researchers found that there was a ‘more than 90 percentt faithful rate ‘.
“Fidelity” is what is used to measure how close the end qubit signal was to the original being sent.
In conversation with Vice, Spentzouris added: “We wanted to push the boundaries for this type of research and take important steps towards real-life applications for quantum communication as well as networking and testing fundamental physics ideas.
“So when we finally did it, the team was delighted, very proud of achieving these high-quality, record-breaking results.
2 months ago“And we are very excited to move to the next stage, leveraging the know-how and technologies of this work to develop quantum networks.”
Maria Spiropulu, Shang-Yi Ch’en professor of physics at Caltech, said: “We are very proud to have reached this milestone in sustainable, high-performing and scalable quantum teleportation systems.
“Results will be further improved with system upgrades expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2021.”
Although, before we all get too excited, it will be a long way before we all use quantum networks.
Spiropulu told Vice, “People on social media are asking if they should sign up for a quantum internet service provider (crazy, of course).
“We need (much) more R&D work.”
Well me and my super fast broadband speeds are ready, guys.