Scientists at the University of Oxford have achieved a significant milestone in quantum computing by building a scalable quantum supercomputer capable of quantum teleportation.
The breakthrough addresses the crucial scalability challenge in quantum computing, with the researchers asserting that their work will pave the way for the next generation of this technology to be realised on a scale that could disrupt industries.
While the field of quantum computing has existed for decades, substantial progress towards practical large-scale applications has only been made in recent years. By harnessing the principles of quantum physics, these advanced machines replace traditional bits – the ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ used in conventional digital information storage and transfer – with quantum bits (qubits). Qubits can exist as both a one and a zero simultaneously, a phenomenon known as superposition.
This capability gives quantum computers the theoretical potential to be orders of magnitude more powerful than today’s most advanced supercomputers that rely on traditional computing technology.
While quantum teleportation – the transfer of data between locations without physically moving qubits – has been achieved by scientists previously, this research marks the first demonstration of quantum teleportation of logical gates, the fundamental building blocks of an algorithm, across a network link.
The researchers suggest that this quantum teleportation technique could form the basis for a future ‘quantum internet’, offering an ultra-secure network for communications, computation, and sensing.
Dougal Main, from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, who led the study explains: “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 also demonstrated that the quantum system could be constructed and scaled using currently available technology.
Professor David Lucas, a principal investigator of the research team and lead scientist at the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub, said: “Our experiment demonstrates that network-distributed quantum information processing is feasible with current technology. Scaling up quantum computers remains a formidable technical challenge that will likely require new physics insights as well as intensive engineering effort over the coming years.”
The findings of the study, titled ‘Distributed quantum computing across an optical network link’, have been published in the journal Nature.
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