By making use of the “creepy” laws behind quantum entanglement, physicists believe they have found a way to make information jump between a pair of electrons separated by distance.
Teleportation of ground states between photons, massless light particles, is fast becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications technology.
But what the latest research has accomplished is quantum teleportation between matter particles (electrons), something that could help connect quantum computing to the more traditional electronic type.
“We provide evidence for ‘tangle exchange,’ in which we create tangles between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and ‘quantum gate teleportation,’ a potentially useful technique for quantum computing by teleportation,” he says. physicist John Nichol of the University of Rochester in New York.
“Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.”
Interlacing is physical jargon for what seems like a fairly straightforward concept.
If you buy a pair of shoes at a store and leave one behind, you will automatically know which foot it belongs to when you get home. The shoes are, in a way, tangled.
If the merchant randomly pulls out their corresponding partner when you return, you’ll think they either remembered your sale, made a lucky assumption, or perhaps were a little “ creepy ” in their prediction.
The real rarity arises when we imagine that your lonely shoe is on the left and right at the same time, at least until you look at it. At that very moment, the shoe companion in the store also gets in shape, as if your furtive gaze teleports at that distance.
It is a kind of random exchange that Einstein felt was too creepy for his comfort. Almost a century after physicists raised the possibility, we now know that teleportation between entangled particles is how the Universe works on a fundamental level.
While it is not exactly a Star Trek-type teleportation that could transmit entire objects through space, the mathematics describing this leap of information is very useful for performing special types of computation in computing.
Typical computer logic is made up of a binary bit language, labeled 1s and 0s. Quantum computing is built with qubits that can occupy both states at the same time, providing much greater possibilities than classical technology cannot touch.
The problem is that the Universe is like a big jumble of shoes, everyone threatens to turn their delicate game of “guess which foot” into a nightmare gamble the moment any qubit interacts with its environment.
The manipulation of photons to transmit their entangled states is made easier by the fact that they can be rapidly separated at the speed of light at great distances through a vacuum or by an optical fiber.
But separating the tangled masses, like pairs of electrons, is more difficult, given their awkward interactions as they bounce, they will almost certainly ruin their mathematically pure quantum state.
However, it is a challenge that is well worth it.
“The single electrons are promising qubits because they interact very easily with each other, and the single electron qubits in semiconductors are also scalable,” says Nichol.
“Reliably creating long-distance interactions between electrons is essential for quantum computing.”
To achieve this, the team of physicists and engineers took advantage of some strange small letters in the laws that govern how the fundamental particles that make up atoms and molecules hold their place.
Two electrons that share the same quantum spin state cannot occupy the same place in space. But there is a small gap that says that nearby electrons can interchange their turns, almost as if their feet could interchange shoes if they are brought close enough.
The researchers had previously shown that this exchange can be manipulated without the need to move the electrons, presenting a potential method for teleportation.
This latest advance helps to bring the process closer to technological reality, overcoming obstacles that would connect quantum rarity with existing computer technology.
“We provide evidence of ‘tangle exchange,’ in which we create two-electron entanglement even though the particles never interact, and ‘quantum gate teleportation,’ a potentially useful technique for quantum computation by teleportation,” says Nichol.
“Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.”
Of course, we are still far from replacing photons with electrons for this type of quantum information transfer. The researchers have not gone so far as to measure the states of the electrons, which means that there could still be all kinds of interference to remove iron.
But having strong evidence of the possibility of teleportation between electrons is an encouraging sign of the possibilities open to future engineers.
This research was published in Nature’s Communications.
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