With just a push of a button, you soon might be able to teleport from your home to the office (or the local pub).
Well, you could do that, if you were a piece of information being whizzed from one computer to another two metres away, rather than a human.
Researchers in Oxford have managed to ‘teleport’ information without sending a traditional physical signal.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean there are actually experiments at the uni where students are being sent from lab to lecture without ever moving.
Instead, the teleportation of data shows that we could build an exponentially powerful computer long thought to be the stuff of science fiction.
In the study, published in the journal Nature, scientists linked up two separate processors to form a single quantum computer.
What is a quantam computer?
A quantum computer isn’t your average laptop.
Computers – like the one you might be using to read this – work by processing ‘bits’ of information that are either ones or zeroes.
A quantum computer, however, uses bits that are ones and zeroes simultaneously. These bits, called ‘quibits’, hold two values instead.
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 (that’s one followed by 24 zeroes) to complete.
Given that this is longer than the universe has even existed, your basic processor wouldn’t ever come close to solving it before Earth got swallowed up by the Sun dying.
The technology is very experimental and won’t be sold at your local Curry’s anytime soon, as they rely on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level, called quantum mechanics.
These modules, nicknamed Alice and Bob, sat about two metres apart. Inside both were two tiny molecules called ions, one which sent and received light particles (photons) and another that processed data.
After connecting the modules, researchers had each zap a photon through a Bell-state analyser, a machine that ‘entangles’ them, so whatever happens to one, happens to the other.
This process, called ‘quantum gate teleportation’ made two qubits sitting in different quantum computers behave as if they were next to each other.
This is thought to be the first time logical gates were ‘teleported’, even though data has previously been ‘teleported’ without moving qubits.
It suggests that a powerful quantum computer might not necessarily have to be a single, massive device.
Still, it could be composed of multiple smaller ones working together, making it easier to build and use, Dougal Main, a researcher at Oxford Physics and study lead, told Metro
‘In the long run, it could enable much more powerful systems capable of solving problems that are far beyond the reach of today’s best supercomputers, such as in areas like drug discovery, materials design, and encryption,’ he said.
Sadly, Main said that while the word ‘teleportation’ is used, ‘it’s not quite Star Trek’.
‘Nothing physical is being moved from one place to another,’ he said.
‘What we’re “teleporting” is information by allowing two arbitrarily separated systems to talk to one-another as if they were directly next to each other.
‘In simple terms, we made it possible for two distant quantum computers to run a joint operation as if they were a single machine – something that’s never been done between processors like this before.’
For Main, his team’s findings are an important leap – a quantum leap – towards building large-scale quantum computers.
This could be used to power advances in artificial intelligence, create new medicine and solve mathematical head-scratchers in a flash.
‘Right now, we’re still in the early stages of this technology,’ added Main, ‘but each advance – like linking two quantum processors – brings us closer to truly large and powerful quantum systems.’
A version of this article was originally published on February 11, 2025.
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