Star Trek like teleportation now possible say researchers
Secure Quantum Teleportation that involves Einstein’s ‘spooky’ steering will help us a lot in the future
Researchers including Swinburne University of Technology‘s Dr Laura Rosales-Zarate and Professor Margaret Reid, together with a team from China and Europe have for the first time ever come up with the specific requirements that are essential for secure quantum teleportation. This quantum teleportation involves phenomenon such as Quantum steering, first proposed by Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger.
The word ‘teleportation’ evokes images of the fictional Star Trek universe where humans and objects are ‘beamed’ to another location.
This research will allow people to use quantum entanglement to send information across large distances that allows information to be transmitted with absolute security, which is essential for a future quantum Internet.
Researchers have already had a lot of success quantum teleporting information and they were successful to some extent before as well by teleporting information over 100km of fibre network. However, due to the system being not so correctly identified, the messages that were transmitted earlier were either incorrect or distorted to which the solution hadn’t been found as yet.
“Teleportation works like a sophisticated fax machine, where a quantum state is transported from one location to another,” said one of the researchers, Margaret Reid, from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
“Let’s say ‘Alice’ begins the process by performing operations on the quantum state – something that encodes the state of a system – at her station. Based on the outcomes of her operations, she communicates (by telephone or public Internet) to ‘Bob’ at a distant location, who is then able to create a replica of the quantum state,” she explains.
“The problem is that unless special requirements are satisfied, quantum mechanics demands that the state at Bob’s end will be ‘fuzzed up’.”
The researchers have now shown that to avoid this. A very special kind of quantum entanglement is required by anyone who wants to teleport an entangled message and that is something known as ‘Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering’.
“Only then can the quality of the transported state be perfect,” said Reid. “The beauty is that quantum mechanics guarantees that a perfect state can only be transported to one receiver. Any second ‘eavesdropper’ will get a fuzzy version.”
In this quantum steering state, basically the measurement of one entangled particle can have an immediate ‘steering’ effect on the state of another distant particle.
After this success, researchers are even more motivated to investigate this phenomenon and figure out more about quantum teleportation so that a more secure and reliable quantum communication network can be made using quantum entanglement.
This research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
