'Quantum Internet' Inches Closer With Advance in Data Teleportation

From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today's machines look like toys. From a report: Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years. In the fall of 2019, Google unveiled an experimental quantum computer showing this was possible. Two years later, a lab in China did much the same. But quantum computing will not reach its potential without help from another technological breakthrough. Call it a "quantum internet" -- a computer network that can send quantum information between distant machines. At the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a team of physicists has taken a significant step toward this computer network of the future, using a technique called quantum teleportation to send data across three physical locations. Previously, this was possible with only two. The new experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites. "We are now building small quantum networks in the lab," said Ronald Hanson, the Delft physicist who oversees the team. "But the idea is to eventually build a quantum internet." Their research, unveiled this week with a paper published in the science journal Nature, demonstrates the power of a phenomenon that Albert Einstein once deemed impossible. Quantum teleportation -- what he called "spooky action at a distance" -- can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it. This technology could profoundly change the way data travels from place to place. It draws on more than a century of research involving quantum mechanics, a field of physics that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. Quantum teleportation not only moves data between quantum computers, but it also does so in such a way that no one can intercept it.

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