In today’s world, sending an item from one location to the other means that the item must leave its initial location to get to the assigned destination. However, there is a possibility that an item can move from one point to the other without physically sending it. This is possible through a phenomenon known as quantum teleportation which is the transportation of a particle through a medium without the particle being physically transported.

How researchers from the University of Turku and USTC achieved high-fidelity quantum teleportation

There have been attempts to achieve quantum teleportation but there have been challenges to its success. A core challenge is the presence of noise and errors in quantum states which typically corrupts the teleported results. This noise, known as decoherence, limits the function of quantum entanglement that makes quantum teleportation possible.

A recent combined research by the University of Turku in Finland, and the University of Science and Technology, China (USTC) just made a groundbreaking discovery of achieving a near-perfect quantum teleportation despite the presence of noise. This research, published in ScienceAdvances applies a new approach involving the placement of multipartite hybrid (different degrees of freedom) entanglement between the auxiliary qubits and their local environments in a controlled state. 

The existence of noise rather than being an impediment became an enabler in this case as it helped achieve high fidelity in the experiment. This overcame the noise and gave a high success rate in the experiment. The research applied an all-optic environment using photons to encode the qubits where polarized photons represented quantum states while their frequencies represented the local environment to create a multipartite hybrid system.

The researchers stated in their paper on ScienceAdvances that “although the total dynamics is unitary, the open system undergoes non-unitary dynamics, which is obtained by averaging over the environment. The resulting dephasing drives the coherence terms of a given system to zero while keeping its populations intact, corresponding to quantum-to-classical transition.”

According to StudyFinds, study author Dr. Zhao-Di Liu, from the University of Science and Technology of China had this to say: “While we have done numerous experiments on different facets of quantum physics with photons in our laboratory, it was very thrilling and rewarding to see this very challenging teleportation experiment successfully completed.”

Jyrki Piilo, a professor from the University of Turku and contributing author, in a media release reported that “The work is based on an idea of distributing entanglement prior to running the teleportation protocol — beyond the used qubits, i.e., exploiting the hybrid entanglement between different physical degrees of freedom.”

Truly, this could be the introduction to advanced communications systems where messages are totally encrypted for secret preservation. Military organisations could apply quantum teleportation in the distribution of information across their networks with high-security detection protocols in place.

It also leads to a future where decoherence can go to zero leading to an absolute maintenance of quantum states and non-distortion of information across large distances. As quantum technology gains global recognition in its future applications, teleportation could see an early significant adoption in areas such as defense, non-physical speech presentation, telecom networks, data transmission, and many more.