Researchers in Oxford have managed to ‘teleport’ information from one computer to another around two metres away without sending a traditional physical signal.
The breakthrough has got a lot of headlines, and it’s definitely exciting if you’ve been waiting for the promised super-speed of quantum computers.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean there are actually experiments at the uni where students are being sent from lab to lecture without ever moving. This blockbuster understanding of teleportation is still a distant dream.
The teleportation of data is still very exciting to computer scientists, though, and here’s why.
It demonstrates that we could be close to actually building a useful quantum computer, rather than just theorising about it. You might call it a leap in the field of quantum computing.
The breakthrough involved linking up two separate processors ‘to form a single, fully connected quantum computer,’ researchers said.
It indicates that a powerful quantum computer wouldn’t necessarily have to be a single, massive, device but could be lots of smaller ones working together, making it easier to build and use.
People want to build quantum computers because they would be so much faster than our current ones, which might look like an arthritic snail next to Usain Bolt once the field really gets going.
For perspective, last year, Google said its quantum chip Willow had managed to do a calculation in minutes which would take the world’s best conventional supercomputer 10 septillion years to complete.
Given that is ‘vastly’ longer than the universe has even existed, your basic processior wouldn’t ever come close to solving it before Earth got swallowed up by the Sun dying.
The new research was published in Nature, which told how it’s thought to be the first time logical gates were ‘teleported’, even though data has previously been ‘teleported’ without moving qubits (quantum bits).
Logical gates are operations which manipulate qubits to tell them which state they should be in.
Study lead Dougal Main said: ‘Previous demonstrations of quantum teleportation have focused on transferring quantum states between physically separated systems. In our study, we use quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems.’
Professor David Lucas, principal investigator of the team, said: ‘Our experiment demonstrates that network-distributed quantum information processing is feasible with current technology.
‘Scaling up quantum computers remains a formidable technical challenge that will likely require new physics insights as well as intensive engineering effort over the coming years.’
It might soon be time for cyber experts to find a new way of keeping data safe, if future computers will be able to crack encryption as easy as a nut.
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