Significant Discovery in Quantum Teleportation

“Beam me up, Scotty.”

Despite the fame of this line, the actors in the original Star Trek series never uttered those words in that order. We’ve seen teleportation of one sort or another throughout TV and movies. Mike Teavee in Willy Wonka transported into a TV, Nightcrawler of the X-Men travels from one place to another through a dangerous other dimension when he poofs, wizards in the Harry Potter universe Apparate, and magic users in Dungeons and Dragons use spells like Blink or Misty Step to disappear and reappear feet away.

What if we told you that teleportation is real? In a way.

In real-world teleportation, the state of a qubit is transferred from one location to another without sending the particle itself. This requires quantum resources, like the entanglement between an additional pair of qubits. Ideally, the transfer and teleportation of the qubit state happen perfectly. In actuality, not so much. Real-world systems are vulnerable to noise and disturbances, which reduces and limits the quality of the teleportation.

Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, and the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei proposed a theoretical idea and conducted experiments to overcome the problems. Their approach enables reaching high-quality teleportation despite noise.

Typically, scientists use photon polarization to entangle qubits in teleportation, while the new approach exploits the hybrid entanglement between the photons’ polarization and frequency. This provides an important change in how noise influences the protocol. The discovery actually reverses the role of the noise from harmful to beneficial.

Teleportation can’t work with conventional qubit entanglement in the presence of noise, and when they start with hybrid entanglement and no noise, teleportation does not work then either.

“However, when we have hybrid entanglement and add noise, the teleportation and quantum state transfer occur in almost perfect manner,” says Dr. Olli Siltanen, whose doctoral dissertation presented the theoretical part of the current research.

The discovery enables almost ideal teleportation despite the presence of certain types of noise when using photons for teleportation.

“This is a significant proof-of-principle experiment in the context of one of the most important quantum protocols,” says Professor Chuan-Feng Li from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.