It is a big deal. It is the building block of future quantum network.
I am a big fan of comic books, and I have a good collection of them in my work room. Reading Comic Books helps build wild imagination - it's productive!.
Ah, those superheroes! - of all heroes I have read, the Blink is the one with Teleportation capabilities. She is unique and seems to have mastered all quantum physic rules. She can perform Portal Creation, Dimensional Energy Projection, Disruption by Partial Teleportation, etc. This girl hero is very quantum aware.
Created by two brilliant non-physicists, Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira, Blink was born a mutant (though at what age exactly she discovered her power is unknown) with the power/ability to generate portals in space and is even capable of creating javelins that can teleport their targets, bend, slow and speed up time and a few other cool things. However, Claire, her real name! (Clarice Ferguson, her "real" name) could not control her powers properly, as whatever she teleported would not be teleported intact.
This sort of skill set (power) is handy if you intend to build a quantum internet, the next generation of a worldwide internet system. The subject of my post is humans (not mutants) who succeeded in sending quantum information between non-adjacent qubits on a rudimentary network for the first time. It is a big deal!. It's really a big deal. Let me explain:
Reading on The Journal of Nature, quantum scientists and researchers at QuTech, in a collaboration between the Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, have taken a big step toward making Blink's idea closer to reality. For the first time, they succeeded in sending quantum information between non-adjacent qubits on a rudimentary network. See the original article here (published in the journal Nature.)
So far, we can build qubits (they are 0 and 1 at the same time, unlike classic computers, either zero or 1) and our qubits are relatively stable. We know using qubits, we can encode (build gates) and do the computation; the problem is we could not transmit that information; but now we can do it. These scientists already demonstrated it.
What you are reading is transmitted over fiber-optic from some server somewhere on the Internet. and that's perfect for classical computer networks. Today's fiber optic networks have a relatively high loss rate, rely on cloning bits, and require signal boosters to transmit over significant distances. So using Fiber Optic for Quantum Information transfer is out. Also, the quantum computing qubits can't be copied or boosted the same way we treat fiber optic transmission. The Information is gone forever when the information is lost since it can not be copied or boosted.
It seems like magic. Scientists can transmit information between two entangled particles, and the data appears at one particle and vanishes at the other instantly. The word Teleportation comes from this experiment. First, it's over here, then it's over there, without the need for a journey along with cables (fiber optic.) Notably, only information is transferred, not any physical matter. This should not be mistaken with teleporting solids like Captain Kirk did in the StarTrek.
In the past, similar experiences has proven ways to connect two entangled particles in the lab. Although a giant leap, it was not enough to build a whole new Internet. For a quantum internet, we need to be able to communicate between non-adjacent nodes. When we solve non-adjacent connectivity challenges, we have the required tools to build many nodes and be able to use intermediaries. These are the building blocks of a stable quantum internet.
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