Story by Douglas Whitbread

A team of British scientists has made an earth-shattering science breakthrough and ‘achieved teleportation’ – using a quantum supercomputer.

Thrilled researchers at the University of Oxford believe the impressive milestone will bring quantum computing closer to large-scale practical use. That’s because they used a ‘photonic network interface’ to successfully link two separate quantum processors to form a single, fully connected quantum computer.

This, according to the universities, will help to tackle computational challenges previously out of reach. If powerful quantum technology is later rolled out successfully, the technology should be able to solve problems way beyond the capabilities of traditional computers.

The breakthrough essentially addresses the technology’s ‘scalability problem’. A quantum computer powerful enough to be industry-disrupting would have to be capable of processing millions of qubits, the basic unit of information. However, packing all these processors in a single device would require a machine of an immense size.

In this new approach, small quantum devices are linked together, enabling computations to be distributed across the network. In theory, there is no limit to the number of processors that could be in the network.

Although quantum teleportation of states has been achieved previously, this study is the first demonstration of quantum teleportation of logical gates (the minimum components of an algorithm) across a network link. According to the researchers, this could lay the groundwork for a future ‘quantum internet,’ where distant processors could form an ultra-secure network for communication, computation, and sensing.

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