Advances in science: Oxford scientists use a quantum supercomputer to perform teleportation

A major milestone in quantum computing has been reached with the development of a scalable quantum supercomputer capable of quantum teleportation by researchers at Oxford University. This scientific breakthrough addresses the so-called scalability problem in quantum computing, which the researchers say will enable the next generation of technology that will disrupt industry.

Advances in quantum physics

Quantum computing has been around for decades, but it is only in recent years that significant progress has been made in putting it into practice.

Taking advantage of the properties of quantum physics, this new generation of machines replaces the traditional bits - ones and zeros - used to store and transmit digital information with quantum bits (qubits) that, through a phenomenon called superposition, can act as both ones and zeros at once.

As a result, quantum computers can be several orders of magnitude more powerful than today's state-of-the-art supercomputers using conventional computing technologies.

The first such example

This is not the first time scientists have achieved quantum teleportation. Scientists have previously moved data from one place to another without moving the qubits. 

But this is the first example of quantum teleportation of logic gates - the minimum components of an algorithm - across a network link.

The researchers say the quantum teleportation method could form the basis of the future 'quantum internet', an ultra-secure network for communication, computing and sensing.

"Previous examples of quantum teleportation have focused on the transfer of quantum states between physically separated systems. In our research, we use quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems. By carefully tailoring these interactions, we can perform logical quantum gates - the basic operations of quantum computation - between qubits in separate quantum computers. This breakthrough allows us to efficiently 'merge' disparate quantum processors into a single, fully connected quantum computer," said Dougal Main, who led the research in the Department of Physics at Oxford University.

Perspectives on quantum systems

The researchers also showed that a quantum system can be built and scaled up using existing technologies.

"Our experiment shows that network-distributed quantum information processing is possible with current technology," said Professor David Lucas, principal investigator of the research team and chief scientist at the UK's Centre for Quantum Computing and Modelling.

Scaling up quantum computing remains a huge technical challenge that is likely to require new physics insights and intensive engineering efforts in the coming years, he said