If most people thought that quantum internet or quantum computers are impossible, Canada and China just reached a scientific breakthrough that proves that at least quantum teleportation can and did happen in their facilities.
Quantum teleportation is the phenomenon wherein the quantum state of a particle affects the quantum state of another through the property commonly known as entanglement. This property states that changing the quantum state of one particle will alter the quantum state of another particle that it is entangles with.
To better understand quantum teleportation, Yahoo! News provides a scenario:
Imagine, if you will, three people: Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants to send information to Bob. In order to do so, she prepares a photon she wants to teleport and sends it to Charlie, while Bob entangles two photons and sends one of them to Charlie.
When Charlie receives the two photons, one each from Alice and Bob, he carries out what's known as a Bell-state measurement, which actually forces the two to become entangled. This, in turn, causes the photon Bob has to collapse into the state of Alice's original photon, thereby teleporting quantum states between Alice and Bob, who can, in theory, be separated by a distance of miles.
The teams from Canada and China achieved quantum teleportation. The Canadian team was able to send quantum information 6.2 kilometers away of Calgary's fiber optic network and the Chinese team achieved 12.5 kilometers through a slightly different configuration.
"The two experiments can be seen as milestones on the path to a long-term goal, namely to build a fibre-based quantum internet connecting large cities," said Johannes Kofler at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, as reported by New Scientist.
The significance of this scientific breakthrough lies in the heart of the evolution of communication wherein information can travel far faster than how it does right now. Quantum computers will be able to do operations faster than imaginable. Quantum internet would allow you to dive into the world of web faster and with better security.
Though it might not be the teleportation that science fiction introduced, the idea of quantum teleportation is no less awe-inspiring.
