Thaindian News

Melbourne, Apr 16 (ANI): A team of scientists from Australia and Japan have found a way to successfully teleport light particles from one place to another, a step that may actually see a real life Captain Kirk being beamed up to Starship Enterprise.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, say this is the first-ever teleportation or transfer of quantum information from one location to another using normal, “classical” communications.

They say it will make possible high-speed, high fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via communications networks.

Professor Elanor Huntington, of the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW’s Canberra campus, explains that teleportation is a fundamental quantum communication technique.

“It relies on having two things,” ABC Science quoted her as saying.

“One is the normal fibre optic Internet or even copper cables, and the other is a shared resource between the sender and the receiver, that could have been shared at any time in the past: we call that entanglement,” she said.

Huntington says the idea of quantum teleportation has been around for about ten years, but has been difficult to put into practice.

“There used to be two ways of doing teleportation and both had their limitations,” she said.

“One was quite fast, but had a limited probability of succeeding. The other way of doing it was quite slow, but had a very good probability of working.

“What we’ve done is managed to get it both fast and good quality,” she revealed.

Researchers teleported the wave packet of lights by using the famed ‘Schrodinger’s cat’ theory.

In Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment of the 1930s, a cat would be placed in a sealed box with a device containing atomic material.

A Geiger counter was included to measure radiation if at some point an atom decayed. Should that happen, the Geiger counter would trigger the release of cyanide gas, which would kill the cat.

The idea was that it was impossible to know whether or not the cat was alive or dead without opening the box and observing it, and that until that happened, both realities existed. This became known as superposition.

Schrodinger’s is said to have devised the experiment to ridicule the emerging theories of quantum physics; but since then physicists have found many examples of superposition in the quantum world.

“What was funky about Schrodinger’s idea was that you could take a normal macroscopic object, which we all think we know and understand fairly well, and you could put it into a quantum superposition - and that’s kind of weird,” Huntington said.

“Nowadays any kind of system where you do that is known as a Schrodinger’s cat.

“So in our case what we’ve done is take a macroscopic beam of light and put it into a quantum superposition, which is extremely fragile, and teleported that from one place to another.

“One of the ways that we encode digital information is by its phase, so what we’ve done is created a wave packet that’s simultaneously a one and a zero in its phase.

“Superposition is exactly what underlies the power of things like quantum computers. You enable parallel processing because at the same time it’s a one and a zero.

“The point is, we’ve managed to teleport it from A to B without the one and the zero getting confused,” she said.

Huntington says being able to demonstrate this will enable researchers to take the next step in quantum computing.

“Being able to transfer data packets like this is a necessary thing to do in order to build a proper quantum computer or a quantum communications device,” she added.

The research has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)