Quantum teleportation breakthrough achieved with diamonds

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft say they achieved a breakthrough in quantum teleportation using diamonds. They’ve managed to teleport quantum information stored in one bit on diamond to another one, located three meters away. This breakthrough is a huge step into the next generation of computing, but the scientists still have work to do until this technology is more reliable and ready to spread worldwide. The scientists are pretty confident regarding their breakthrough, so we might witness a futuristic technology sooner than we thought.

Quantum teleportation consists in moving quantum information, called qubit, from one point to another without that qubit crossing the space between the two points. All this is possible due to the phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The phenomenon happens when the properties of a pair of particles are linked very tightly, so measuring one particle also affects the other one. The quantum entanglement is possible regardless of the distance between the two particles, so the quantum information can be teleported at greater distances than three meters, perhaps even across a country. The scientists published an article in which they described how they used quantum-entanglement particles to send data from one nitrogen-infused bit of diamond to another. Fortunately, the team managed to add reliability and consistency to their great achievement.

Quantum teleportation is one of the more focused on research ares, so the team at Kavli Institute wasn’t the only one working on this technology. Other attempts to reach successes in quantum teleportation didn’t provide the same reliability. The previously used methods didn’t work as well as expected, while the method used by the scientists at Kavli Institute was indeed a breakthrough. The breakthrough, as the team said in the report, is more a consistent quantum teleportation compared to all previous attempts. The team is now thinking about repeating the experiment and prove that their method is reliable, even if they enlarge the distance between the two diamond bits. The scientists are also very confident that their method, involving the usage of nitrogen-embedded diamonds, will be the future step towards quantum networks.