Researchers at the University of Calgary have successfully teleported a photon (an elementary particle of light) over a straight line.
What began with an Urban Alliance seed grant in 2014 has now set a record for teleporting an elementary light particle over a distance of six kilometers using The City of Calgary's fiber optic cable infrastructure.
The ground-breaking achievement is the result of a collaboration between The City of Calgary's University of Calgary and researchers in the United States led by Wolfgang Tittel, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary. The researchers have published their work about quantum entanglement in the journal Nature Photonics.
Entanglement explains a scenario where the quantum state of one particle can be instantly shared by another, in an association between two photons, in such a way that they remain linked regardless of distance
Quantum teleportation between a pair of entangled photons occurs when quantum information from one particle to another gets transferred over a distance without the actual particles meeting.
A group of Chinese researchers have also demonstrated a similar finding and published it with the Calgary studies.
The International Business Times explains quantum teleportation as follows:
Here's how quantum teleportation works. Imagine, if you will, three people - Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants to send information to Bob. In order to do so, she prepares a photon she wants to teleport and sends it to Charlie, while Bob entangles two photons and sends one of them to Charlie. When Charlie receives the two photons - one each from Alice and Bob - he carries out what's known as a Bell-state measurement, which actually forces the two to become entangled. This, in turn, causes the photon Bob has to collapse into the state of Alice's original photon, thereby teleporting quantum states between Alice and Bob, who can, in theory, be separated by a distance of miles.