Quantum teleportation is the ability to transmit from one location to another without travelling through the space in between. Matter itself doesn’t make this journey, only the information that describes it. This is transmitted to a new body that takes on the identity of the original.
But while science fiction fans have focused on body involved, quantum physicists are more interested in the information. For them, teleportation is the enabling technology behind a new generation of information processing technologies including a quantum internet that allows information to be transmitted with perfect security.
One of the building blocks of the quantum internet will be quantum routers that can receive quantum information from location and route it on to another without destroying it. So the race is on to demonstrate this kind of technology, which has the potential to revolutionise communications.
Today, Felix Bussières at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and a few pals say they’ve taken an important step towards this. These guys have teleported quantum infromation to a crystal doped with rare-earth ions—a kind of quantum memory. But crucially they’ve done it for the first time over the kind of ordinary optical fibre that telecommunications that are in use all over the world.
One of the main requirements for widespread teleportation is entangled photons with a wavelength compatible with telecom fibre. That’s not so easy to produce since the entangled photons must be compatible with the discrete energy jumps in the quantum memory. “This wavelength is typically far away from the low-loss region of standard optical fibre,” say Bussières and co.
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