In a breakthrough for human communication, scientists have achieved the impossible: quantum teleportation.
However, before you shout “Beam me up, Scotty,” this new technology is not designed for teleporting people or things, but information. Specifically, scientists have worked out how to teleport information almost instantly and over any distance - without needing any future technology. Instead, they think they can make quantum teleportation possible through existing networks, reports BBC Science Focus.
“This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible,” said Prof Prem Kumar of Northwestern University in the US, who led the study. “Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fibre optic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level.”
Optical communications, meaning any communication method that converts signals into light to transmit information, are central to most telecommunications systems (fibre optics are a type of optical communication).
Published in the journal Optica, the new research proposes that the breakthrough could make these communications super secure and nearly instantaneous - limited only by the speed of light.
So how does it work? Quantum teleportation relies on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, where two particles are linked regardless of how far apart they are, and don’t need to physically travel to exchange information. From here on it gets way more complicated, so let's just leave it at that for now and congratulate the team on their achievement.