In a big breakthrough, researchers have achieved sustained, long-distance quantum teleportation for the first time. Scientists claim this is a big step towards a practical quantum internet.
This research is published in PRX Quantum. Scientists at Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, and their partners are behind this research.
Panagiotis Spentzouris, one of the paper’s co-authors said, “We’re thrilled by these results,”
“This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication.”
According to a Fermilab statement, this research could form the basis for “a viable quantum internet — a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement”. So this could help “transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing, and computing,”
Researchers demonstrated a sustained, long-distance (44 kilometers of fiber) teleportation of qubits of photons with fidelity greater than 90%. The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors and off-the-shelf equipment.
Quantum qubits are the basic units of quantum computing. So after this success, scientists are hoping to create networks of quantum computers that can share information at very high speeds.
