Physicists Smash Quantum Teleportation Record With 60-Mile Fiber Jump
A team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology has broken the distance record for quantum teleportation down optical fiber, showing theyre able to transfer quantum information over 60 miles.
The researchers have shown that they can perform quantum communication, often performed in free space, over standard fiber-optic lines. It means theyve been able to move the information down fiber four times farther than the previous record, which is an attractive proposition for those aiming to create a quantum internet.
Quantum teleportation isnt quite the matter-shifting technique of Star Trek, but instead the process of transferring in fact scientists say remotely reconstructing information thats held in the quantum state of one chunk of matter or light to another, some distance away. The NIST scientists have shown that they can transfer the quantum state from one photon, down 102 kilometers thats over 60 miles of spooled optical fiber in the lab, to another photon. The experiment is reported in Optica, and the infographic below does a nice job of describing how the team achieved the result.
It may sound like a logical step to send quantum information down fiber optic cableafter all, its how much of the worlds data is now sent. But it was only made possible at such distances by a new type of single-photon detector developed at NIST. Only about 1 percent of photons make it all the way through 100 km of fiber,
http://gizmodo.com/physicists-smash-quantum-teleportation-record-with-60-m-1732525396