Teleportation is the transferring of matter or energy from a point to another without having it move through physical space. You’d think it’s all science fiction, but in quantum physics, it has been proved in real life experiment, which is a milestone scientists have finally achieved.
However, don’t think that this means you’ll soon be able to teleport anything more than, let’s say, a quantum gate between two qubits without interaction.
This is exactly what a team of scientists from Yale managed to do, and it’s a breakthrough in the future of quantum computers.
The Teleportation of a Quantum Gate
The study was published in Nature, where the authors explain they wanted to remove the errors or noise in quantum computing, which are usually introduced by quantum computing processors:
“A quantum computer has the potential to efficiently solve problems that are intractable for classical computers. However, constructing a large-scale quantum processor is challenging because of the errors and noise that are inherent in real-world quantum systems.”
A solution was to use a different way of organization, which can be found in nature: it’s called modularity. Cells use compartmentalization to create a whole, and scientists can use this approach to manage the errors in quantum calculations.
But for this solution to work, they first had to teleport a quantum gate that would allow interactions with no error while the transfer is made. This idea was a theory back in the 1990s, and the team at Yale has finally demonstrated it in an experiment, said the co-author of the study, Kevin Chou:
“Our work is the first time that this protocol has been demonstrated where the classical communication occurs in real-time, allowing us to implement a ‘deterministic’ operation that performs the desired operation every time.”
The authors added that their experiment proves that the theory works and can be now used in “quantum communication, metrology and simulations.”
Robert Schoelkopf, the lead author of the study, concluded that their study is “a milestone toward quantum information processing using error-correctable qubits.”
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.