Quantum Internet

Researchers from China have successfully teleported an object from Earth to the Orbit. The object-in-question is a photon, which travelled from Gobi desert to a satellite called ‘Micius’ orbiting five hundred kilometres in total. This is believed to be an important step towards establishing a global-scale quantum internet.

“This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet,” say the researchers. Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford University Ian Walmsley tells how quantum entanglement works and how teleportation could be utilised.

He explained that such a deed is achievable through a process called ‘Quantum Entanglement,’ wherein two particles react as one with no physical connection between them, say agencies. Though this feat is called quantum teleportation, no actual teleportation of objects occurs. It’s a way of transmitting information about a particle; while it sounds exotic, it is routinely used in laboratories on Earth.

Entanglement is a property of particles created at the same time which exist in a shared state, such that actions affecting one particle also affect the other. This holds even when the particles are separated by a great distance. In 1993, physicists realised entanglement could be used to effectively copy the quantum state of a particle and paste it onto another particle, making the second particle identical to the first in all respects except location. It is as if the first particle has been cloned, or teleported, writes cosmosmagazine.com.

Scientists all over the world are working towards new methods to realize an unhackable internet, an internet based on quantum entanglement – an invisible quantum mechanical connection – as networking links. The greatest challenge is scaling to large networks that share entangled links with many particles and network nodes. Researchers in Delft and Oxford have now managed to distil a strong entangled link by combining multiple weaker quantum links into one.

This method is essential to realize a trustworthy quantum network between several quantum nodes. This innovative new work has now been published in Science magazine, writes https://phys.org. Quantum internet is a new kind of internet that would be slower, but more secure. The scientists can encode the quantum states of an object onto light particles and broadcast it over long distances. These quantum states then would be used to decode the information and use it further, says fossbytes.com.