Mention the word ‘teleportation’ and for many people it conjures up "Beam me up, Scottie” images of Captain James T Kirk.
But in the last two decades quantum teleportation – transferring the quantum structure of an object from one place to another without physical transmission -- has moved from the realms of Star Trek fantasy to tangible reality.
Quantum teleportation is an important building block for quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum network and, eventually, a quantum Internet. While theoretical proposals for a quantum Internet already exist, the problem for scientists is that there is still debate over which of various technologies provides the most efficient and reliable teleportation system. This is the dilemma which an international team of researchers, led by Dr Stefano Pirandola of the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, set out to resolve.
In a paper published in Nature Photonics, the team, which included scientists from the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universities of Tokyo and Toronto, reviewed the theoretical ideas around quantum teleportation focusing on the main experimental approaches and their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
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