From Santa Barbara, California, to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new type of computer that will make today’s machines look like toys. Harnessing the mysterious power of quantum mechanics, it will be able to do in minutes what even supercomputers could not do in thousands of years. In the fall of 2019, Google unveiled an experimental quantum computer that showed it was possible. A lab in China did the same two years later. But quantum computing won’t reach its potential without the help of another technological breakthrough. The technology is known as the “quantum internet” – a network of computers that can send quantum information between remote machines. At Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a team of physicists has taken an important step toward this future computer network, using a technique called quantum teleportation to send data between three physical locations . Previously it was only possible to send data between two points.
The new experiment shows that scientists can scale quantum networks to a growing number of sites. “We are now building small quantum networks in the lab,” said physicist Ronald Hanson of the Delft University of Technology who led the team. “But our idea is to eventually build a quantum internet.” Their research paper is published in this paper. In Zhou’s Nature, he discusses the power of phenomena that Albert Einstein once thought impossible. Quantum teleportation — what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” — can transmit information between locations without moving the physical matter that carries the information. This technology could profoundly change the way data is transferred from one place to another. It draws on more than a century of research into quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that studies the field of subatoms that behave differently than anything we experience in our daily lives. Quantum teleportation not only enables the transfer of data between quantum computers, but no one can intercept the transfer.
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