Being here and an instant later finding yourself on the other side of the worldwithout planes and without suitcases. The teleportation it is one of the most fascinating dreams, but it really is just science fiction? The answer is more surprising than you think: the teleportation of matter stay impossiblebut that of information it is already reality.
We entered the laboratory of Quantum Internet Research Group from the Federico II University of Naples, one of the most innovative research groups in the world on this front to tell you about it.
Because the teleportation of matter is not scientifically possible
The flea in the head on the teleporter put it there Star Trek. Sixty years ago that series invented the teleporter: one machine that took a person, the dematerialized and rebuilt it on the other side, atom by atom. But will we ever get there?
To teleport a person you would need to have a complete description of the physical state of all particles in the bodya kind of super precise photography. The problem is that we cannot know the position and velocity of a particle at the same time: the more we try to know one quantity, the more we lose information about the other: it is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Plus, the simple act of “reading” this information alters it, because we should interact with particlesdisturbing them. It’s not a technological limit, it’s a fundamental limit.
Even if we were to succeed, information could not travel faster than light: no instantaneous teleportation. What if we sent the information to build a perfect copy on the other side? The original would still be here. We wouldn’t have teleported, we would have duplicated ourselves. The non-cloning theorem prohibits perfectly copying the state of a quantum system. In short, the teleportation of matter is not scientifically possible.
What is entanglement, the bond that allows the teleportation of information
The same physics that closes this door, however, opens another. If we can’t teleport matter, we can teleport information. And no, we’re not talking about the internet: that works with electricity and physical cables. Here we are talking about something different, which exploits a phenomenon in quantum physics called entanglement.
Entanglement is a link between two microscopic particles. When two particles are “entangled”, the state of one is profoundly related to the state of the other, regardless of distance. A can be found on Earth And the other in space, but when you get information about one, you will already instantly get information about the other.
There is no signal traveling between them, it is a correlation that exists regardless of distance. It was such a strange thing that even Einstein couldn’t accept it: he called it “scary action at a distance”, thinking that there was information hidden somewhere that explained everything.
Yet increasingly precise experiments have proven Einstein wrong: entanglement existsit is real, it has no equivalent in the classical world and in 2022 these results won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
From the Naples laboratory to the quantum internet: how it works
The crazy thing is that entanglement it is a natural phenomenon, but it can also be created artificially in laboratory. It does, for example, the Quantum Internet Research Group of the Federico II University of Naples, one of the most innovative research groups in the world.
Researchers use i photonsthe fundamental particles of light: they take a laser, shoot photons at crystals with special physical characteristics, pass them through mirrors and plates, and eventually some are transformed into entangled pairs that from then on will share common characteristics. These photons travel along a optical fiber ring which connects the university campuses, and after a kilometre-long journey (less than a blink of an eye) the researchers they teleport information exploiting entanglement.
The goal is move from physics to engineering: generate entanglement and distribute it in cities to build the Quantum Internet. We are in the midst of a revolution that could be as powerful as when the internet was created. When the internet was conceived, no one would have imagined emails, instant messaging apps or social networks: yet, it has changed our lives.
We don’t yet know the potential of this technology: thinking small, it could revolutionize securitybecause the information would no longer travel through an interceptable physical channel. But the implications could be much broader than what we imagine today: what is certain is that the very concept of communication would fundamentally change.
