Oxford scientists achieve teleportation with quantum supercomputer
Breakthrough brings quantum computing closer to large-scale practical use
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Think of it like an identical pair of Shrodinger's Cats. You can't know if the cat is alive or dead 'til you open the box, but because they're identical you know that the other box will show the same result as your own.
The lasers don't transmit information, they transmit a quantum superposition. The act of measuring this quantum state creates information, and because the photons are entangled, this information includes what was received at both ends.
So the photons that carry the information aren't teleported, but the information itself is because it doesn't exist until it is observed.
It might be counterintuitive, but that's genuinely how quantum systems work.
The entangled photons are in a state of quantum superposition until they are measured, and that measurement creates information about the state of both photons.
It's not a process that can be used to transmit classical information, it's a process that transmits identical quantum random numbers to two places at once that can't be intercepted without breaking their identicalness.
“Previous demonstrations of quantum teleportation have focused on transferring quantum states between physically separated systems,” said Dougal Main, from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, who led the study.
"In our study, we use quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems. By carefully tailoring these interactions, we can perform logical quantum gates – the fundamental operations of quantum computing – between qubits housed in separate quantum computers.
“This breakthrough enables us to effectively 'wire together' distinct quantum processors into a single, fully-connected quantum computer.”
To simplify, they're not just entangling pairs of photons and sending them out to two systems, but entangling entire qubits that exist on separate systems. This allows the qubits on separate systems to interact with each other without collapsing their superposition, enabling the quantum equivalent of parallel processing.
Rather than two identical Shrodinger's Cats as in entangled photons, the entangled qubits act as one Shrodinger's Cat that's in two places simultaneously.
The optics are just the medium through which the qubits are entangled, the interesting part isn't the lasers but the interaction between physically-separated qubits.
You could theoretically accomplish the same thing by physically bonking the qubits together so that they interact via nuclear forces instead of the electromagnetic field, like they did with entire molecules at Durham University a few weeks back: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/world-first-quantum-entanglement-of-molecules-at-92-fidelity-uk-achieves-magic/ar-AA1xfHI9
It is teleportation, but the thing being teleported is information about a quantum state.
The particles that carry this information are in a quantum superposition, like Shrodinger's Cat. Because of quantum physics, the information they carry doesn't exist until you open the box and measure it.
They call it "teleportation" because it allows us to copy quantum information from one place to another without ever opening the box and collapsing the superposition at any point inbetween.
Where's it say they used a laser to transfer the information? This sounded like quantum entanglement was being demonstrated here
The word laser does not appear once in this article.
So...not in the article, but in a completely different linked article. Got it
Hyperlink which went to a different article. Do you not understand how the Internet works? Don't act like you weren't wrong when you failed to clarify properly. That's not on me