Quantum teleportation over a fiber optic cable carrying Internet has been successfully demonstrated by engineers in a laboratory at Northwestern University. The quantum teleportation was achieved over a length of 18.7-miles of fiber optics carrying 400-Gbps C-band classical traffic.
The ability for quantum and conventional networks to operate in the same optical fibers simplifies the infrastructure required for advanced sensing technologies or quantum computing applications, according to Northwest Now, a university publication.
“Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiber optic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level,” said Prem Kumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.
Quantum teleportation increases the speed by which information can be shared between distant network users by using a technique where two particles are linked regardless of the distance between them, known as quantum entanglement. The information is transmitted using single photons, as opposed to millions of particles of light.
“The photon itself does not have to be sent over long distances, but its state still ends up encoded onto the distant photon,” said Jordan Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in Kumar’s laboratory and the first author of “Quantum teleportation coexisting with classical communications in optical fiber,” which was published in the journal Optica. The U.S. National Science Foundation explains that “in the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.”
In the future, quantum entanglement could be used in ultra-secure encryption or to move quantum information between different parts of a quantum computer or to create a super fast internet.
