Researchers successfully teleported information about the quantum side of a photon (a particle of light) over the record-breaking distance of 15.5 miles of optical fiber to a crystal "memory bank."
The previous quantum teleportation record was a mere 3.7 miles, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported. In quantum entanglement two particles function as if they were connected, even if they are miles apart.
"We can imprint the state of a system on another system, even when the two are far apart," said Francesco Marsili, microdevices engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Using this effect in communications could help in building an intrinsically secure space communication network - i.e., communication channels that cannot be hacked."
In order to accomplish the impressive teleportation researcher developed the most sensitive photon detector in the world.
"Reaching this distance could not have been possible without the JPL NIST detectors," said Félix Bussières at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, who is the lead author of the study.
Quantum teleportation could be used for purposes such as creating more secure bank accounts or preventing attacks on communication channels in space.
"If you're communicating with your astronauts on Mars, you don't want to have hackers break the encrypted channel and give them false information," Marsili said.
Quantum teleportation is extremely complex, but an analogy can be used to help break it down:
"Let's say there are two people, Alice and Bob. Alice wants Bob to have a photon that's in the same 'state' as her photon, which we'll call photon P. For the sake of this analogy, we'll pretend that the 'state' is a color, and photon P is yellow. A third person named Charlie sends out two entangled photons, photon A to Alice and photon B to Bob, which behave as if they are part of the same whole. Both of these photons start out as blue," the researchers wrote.
When Alice's two photons collude they annihilate one another; although they are destroyed in the crash the yellow color is preserved. Since the photons are entangled, the yellow color is "teleported."
"When Alice measures the state of her photon, Bob's photon changes state as well, as if flipping a switch," Marsili said. "But Bob cannot know how the switch flipped unless Alice sends him the bits of information classically." An example of a "classic" information transfer would be sending pulses of light over an optical fiber.
