Saturday September 24, 2016

Quantum Teleportation

Downtown Calgary at night polar panorama

Downtown Calgary at night polar panorama (Flickr (Creative Commons 2.0))

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A recent experiment involving the teleportation of encrypted information on a photon - a particle of light - may one day enable secure communication on a quantum internet. The experiment, conducted by Dr. Wolfgang Tittel from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, was based on Einstein's principle of entanglement - particles sharing the same properties regardless of distance. In this case, the entangled particles were photons six kilometres apart in the city of Calgary.  Encoded information on one photon was teleported to the other using common fibre optics. The speed-of-light transfer of the encoded information from one photon to another demonstrates the possibility of secure communication between a network of remotely located quantum computers in the future.   

​Related Links:

  • Dr. Tittel's paper in Nature Photonics 
  • University of Calgary news
  • CBC News story
  • BBC news story
  • Bob tells Peter Armstrong (CBC's On The Money) about spooky distance