We’ve taken another giant step forward in transmitting images using only light

Quantum teleportation is expected to play a central role in securing the future information highway.

While progress has been made, the process remains slow and somewhat clumsy.That may be changing, as scientists have used a new process that can efficiently teleport light states and form images using a pair of entangled photons

The team from South Africa, Germany and Spain hope this innovation will help build the secure networks of the future: if critical data isn’t transmitted, it can’t be stolen.

“Traditionally, two communicating parties would physically send a message from one to the other, even in the quantum realm,” says Andrew Forbes, a physicist at the University of the Witwatersrand. said.

“Now, it is possible to send messages so that they are not physically transmitted through the connections enabled by Star Trek technology.”

The research builds on the concept of quantum entanglement, where separated particles stay connected through the wonders of quantum physics. The state of one particle can tell us something about another particle, even if they are far apart.

Two entangled photons were used here, but the researchers were able to pack more information into it than normal, so it has the potential to encode images. What’s more, these extra messages are successfully “transmitted” from one place to another.

However, this is not teleportation in the standard sense. Although the information itself is not transmitted (for example, through a network connection), careful measurement of a specific feature on one entangled particle immediately affects the relevant feature on the other entangled particle, effectively transmitting its quantum state.

That state can then be locked in place by transmitting the actual details of the original measured particle in an old-fashioned, non-teleporting manner, while the original state is destroyed.

While it may not be a faster way to send messages, it does create a convenient quantum watermark for any information you don’t want others to see.

In this latest experiment, researchers show how an innovative new detection method can provide the necessary measurement of the angular momentum of photons, thereby increasing the number of dimensions that can be transported in quantum states.

“The protocol has all the hallmarks of teleportation, except for one basic element: It requires a bright laser beam to make the nonlinear detector efficient so that the sender can know what is being sent, but doesn’t need to know,” Said Forbes.

“In that sense, it’s not strictly teleportation, but it might be possible in the future if nonlinear detectors can be made more efficient.”

The “nonlinear detector” mentioned here is another key part of the device, both to handle the extra capacity of entangled photons and to ensure that the message is accurately transmitted from one point to another.

The researchers suggest that one method that could be used in the future is to send your fingerprints to a bank. By transmitting the spatial details of your fingerprint in the form of quantum states, future security measures could create a key that effectively locks into a box of digital messages, a message that is personalized to your body..

Although the physics here are quite complex, now that proof-of-concept experiments have been performed in the laboratory, we can expect further progress in the field of quantum teleportation.

Adam Valls, a physicist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain, said: “We hope that this experiment shows the feasibility of this process and promotes further development in the field of nonlinear optics by pushing the limits of full quantum realization.”

The study was published in nature communications.