Whether it’s the sci-fi future of beaming humans across space or the more grounded concept of quantum computing, our visions of teleportation so far have always clung to a central premise: the ability to transport quantum states between distant particles, known as entanglement. A property first described by Einstein back in the 1930s, entanglement represents some of the most outlandish physics of the subatomic world—specifically, the fact that particles can experience an inexplicable, invisible link across even vast distances.
When the position, orientation, and other properties of a particle are transmitted to an entangled particle somewhere else, the receiving particle immediately takes on the characteristics of the original one. But because of a little-understood property of quantum physics, the original particle spontaneously ceases to exist the instant the information is transferred. The result is a perfect physical representation of the particle elsewhere, which makes it easy to see how quantum entanglement could be the basis for teleporting large objects like goods or people when blown up to the macro scale.
Researchers and scientists have been using knowledge of entanglement to teleport particles since the first successful experiment in 1997, but the transmission of information is incredibly fragile and prone to signal decay and decoherence (when the quantum system breaks down and can be explained through classical physics) when interacting with other waveforms and fields. That means the only real success stories so far have been around sending entangled particle information through dedicated channels like standalone fiber optic connections.
That is, until now. In a groundbreaking scientific experiment, a team at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering managed to teleport a particle through around 18 miles of public internet infrastructure. They published their results last December in the peer-reviewed journal Optica.
The new work is a huge deal because it’s the first instance of quantum teleportation going through an existing internet data channel. Due to how fragile the quantum transfer process is, scientists have long assumed the next generation of internet traffic, which will be quantum in nature, won’t be able to coexist with the data that carries our endless Netflix streams, text messages, and e-commerce transactions today. Some experiments have been able to retain the coherence of an entangled signal through simulated internet information streams, but never through the actual internet itself. Now, that’s all changed.
The Northwestern team knew they needed to come up with a way for the entangled particle—a photon, the single particle that “carries” light across space—to retain its coherence amid other internet traffic up to the standard capacity of 400 gigabits. The journey would look a bit like driving a motorcycle along a jammed-up freeway versus a lonely country road. The secret to ushering the photon along this jammed highway came down to the way light scatters in a medium. The researchers discovered if they fired the photon using the right conditions, they could minimize the path the signal takes, therefore reducing the interference it would encounter.
This is a shot in the arm for the development of quantum computing. That’s because the theory of quantum computing has long been accepted inside an individual device where the data pathways are carefully managed and controlled—it will one day lead to vastly better-performing standalone devices like phones, servers, and laptops—but the quantum internet was another matter altogether.
Once we get there, the difference between the quantum internet and the regular internet is a bit like the difference between the regular internet and smoke signals. Quantum internet will enable applications more powerful that we can even dream of yet, let alone build and deploy. Just some of the ones we can imagine are vastly more powerful cryptography; AI that learns exponentially faster and better; and the means to accurately model systems that are far too large, fast-changing, and varied to analyze today, like global weather.
Much like the internet today, the quantum internet will work over a network of widely dispersed nodes and transmission systems, from waveforms over the airwaves to fiber optic cables in the ground, to send information between entangled particles. The stumbling block has always been the inability to send quantum-entangled information alongside countless other signals using existing data infrastructure. But the Northwestern team’s breakthrough means there will be no need to buy and build a whole new systems of wires, towers, and nodes specifically for quantum data.
In other words, this is a giant leap forward toward the internet of tomorrow.
After growing up knowing he wanted to change the world, Drew Turney realized it was easier to write about other people changing it instead. He writes about everything from entertainment to technology, science to culture and everything in between, and has been published in media both on and offline all over the world.
