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 this impressive milestone will bring quantum computing closer to large-scale practical use. They used a ‘photonic network interface’ to successfully link two separate quantum processors, forming a single, fully connected quantum computer.
According to the universities, this will help tackle computational challenges previously out of reach. If this powerful quantum technology is successfully deployed, it could solve problems far 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 need to process millions of qubits, the fundamental units of information. However, integrating all these processors into a single device would require an enormous machine.
With 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 connected within this network.
Although quantum teleportation of states has been achieved before, 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 system for communication, computation, and sensing.
The concept is similar to how traditional supercomputers work. These systems are made up of smaller computers linked together to achieve capabilities far greater than those of individual units. This strategy circumvents many of the engineering obstacles associated with packing an ever-growing number of qubits into a single device while preserving the delicate quantum properties needed for accurate and robust computations.
Study lead Dougal Main (Department of Physics) said: “Previous demonstrations of quantum teleportation have focused on transferring quantum states between physically separated systems. In our study, we use quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems.
“By carefully tailoring these interactions, we can perform logical quantum gates – the fundamental operations of quantum computing – between qubits housed in separate quantum computers.”
“This breakthrough enables us to effectively ‘wire together’ distinct quantum processors into a single, fully connected quantum computer.”
The researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of this method by executing Grover’s search algorithm. This quantum method searches for a particular item in a large, unstructured dataset much faster than a regular computer, using the quantum phenomena of superposition and entanglement to explore many possibilities in parallel.
The successful demonstration of this algorithm highlights how a distributed approach can extend quantum computing capabilities beyond the limits of a single device, paving the way for scalable, high-performance quantum computers capable of running calculations in hours that would take today’s supercomputers years to solve.
