Daily Times

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics—albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”—also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement—one of the basic of concepts of quantum physics—the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly “teleports” its state to the two entangled particles.

Quantum teleportation is an important means for transmitting information in quantum computing. While a typical computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits, quantum computers encode information in quantum bits, or qubits. A bit has a single binary value, which can be either “0” or “1,” but qubits can be both “0” and “1” at the same time. The ability for individual qubits to simultaneously occupy multiple states underlies the great potential power of quantum computers.

Allowing electrons to use quantum-mechanical interactions over a distance without touching could revolutionize the development of quantum computers. After all, semiconductors inside conventional computers use electrons to transmit information.

“We provide evidence for ‘entanglement swapping,’ in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and ‘quantum gate teleportation,’ a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation,” John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Rochester, co-author of the new paper published in Nature Communications this week, said in a statement. “Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.”

“Individual electrons are promising qubits because they interact very easily with each other, and individual electron qubits in semiconductors are also scalable,” Nichol said.

But passing this information over longer distances remains to be a big hurdle. “Reliably creating long-distance interactions between electrons is essential for quantum computing,” Nichol added.