Quantun Teleportation Breakthrough Achieved

Physicists at University of Calgary successfully teleported a photon over a distance of six kilometers setting up groundbreaking work for super-fast and secure quantum communication.

The team led by Wolfgang Tittel encoded the photon with some information and transferred its quantum state through fiber-optic to another location. 

The experiment was based on the principle on entanglement.

"Being entangled means that the two photons that form an entangled pair have properties that are linked regardless of how far the two are separated," said Dr Tittel.

"When one of the photons was sent over to City Hall, it remained entangled with the photon that stayed at the University of Calgary.

“What happened is the instantaneous and disembodied transfer of the photon’s quantum state onto the remaining photon of the entangled pair, which is the one that remained six kilometres away at the university.”

The data transfer of this communication would also be theoretically fully secure and unhackable as the original photon is destroyed along with its message or the encrypted key in the process. 

“If you’re using quantum teleportation it’s impossible for an eavesdropper to tap into a connection without the encrypted key,” he said.

“It also opens the door to building a network of quantum computers that could have computing powers completely unmatched by any classical computer.”