Spooky Action at a Tiny Distance: Scientists Teleport Qubits Across a Chip

Teleportation, in the Star Trek sense, may be far off or even impossible, but here in reality, scientists are learning to use a hitch in quantum mechanics to teleport information from point A to point B instantly.

Faster computers, faster encryption, and maybe a truly instant Internet is are all one step closer to becoming a reality, as scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich have discovered a way to use quantum teleportation to transfer information within an electronic circuit instantaneously - literally.

Entanglement, Quantum Teleportation, and Qubits

Current electronics use circuitry and electric currents, and though the movement of electrons through circuits is so lightning fast it seems instant, it's not. The electrons still must transfer physically for information to move. Using quantum entanglement, researchers have found a way to cut out the requirement for electrons to travel any distance at all. When entangled, two separate particles can have an effect on each other with no respect to distance. Scientists have known about this for a while now: Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance." While not actually moving, the change in "Quantum state" of one particle - for example particles can spin up or down (or have many other states) - can change the state of the other, entangled particle instantly.

When you have a sender and a receiver like this, and two states that can change, you've got yourself a version of that "either-or" binary code, which is the 1s or 0s of tiny "bits" of information that all information technology is based on. The only difference is that with quantum teleportation, quantum bits (qubits) can "carry" both 1s and 0s simultaneously, allowing for faster, more efficient information transfer (and speculative future sci-fi technologies like impossible-to-crack encryption).

The Experiment

The most recent breakthrough comes from Zurich, where information was sent over just 6 millimeters - the distance within an electronic chip. That might sound unimpressive (or impractical), but it was done without any transfer of electrons or any other physical carrier of the information. In that way, it is a little like Star Trek, according to Andreas Wallraff, Professor at the Department of Physics and lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Nature. "Quantum teleportation is comparable to beaming as shown in the science fiction series Star Trek," said Wallraff in a release. "The information does not travel from point A to point B. Instead, it appears at point B and disappears at point A, when read out at point B."

On top of the feat of just getting the information teleported accurately, the researchers were able to do it at a fast rate. Approximately 10,000 quantum bits per second can be teleported in this chip-wide system. This is important, of course, because information technology must transfer large amounts of information constantly.

Previous experiments have teleported information longer distances or more consistently. Researchers, for example, at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have recently successfully teleported information between two clouds of gas atoms using a laser - and were able to consistently carry out the experiment every single time.

But we don't use clouds of gas in our electronics. With the most recent successes in quantum teleportation in Zurich, we may have an information teleportation method that works within circuits. "This is interesting, because such circuits are an important element for the construction of future quantum computers," says Wallraff, later adding, "Teleportation is an important future technology in the field of quantum information processing."

The next thing Wallraff and his colleagues intend to do is to try teleporting information from one chip to another, with a longer term goal to explore whether quantum teleportation is practical over longer distances, like the distances that we generally use fiber optics to communicate over. The next step after that? Beam me up.