Qutrits: Now It’s Time For 3D Quantum Teleportation

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum computers.

Quantum teleportation is the transfer of quantum information—for instance, a particle’s quantum state—between distant systems without moving a physical particle. It allows a “disembodied” transmission of unknown quantum states between distant quantum systems.

Austrian and Chinese scientists have for the first time succeeded in transferring three-dimensional quantum states (symbolic image) © ÖAW/Harald Ritsch

Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum computers.

Now it’s time for teleportation of arbitrarily high-dimensional photonic quantum states and demonstrate an example of teleporting a qutrit.

The first experiment to teleport qutrit – a 3D quantum state – was conducted by physicists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. Together with quantum physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China, they have succeeded in teleporting complex high-dimensional quantum states.

The team shared a pair of entangled photons between the transmitter (Alice) and the receiver (Bob). Each photon could take one of three possible paths whose superposition yielded a 3D entangled state, a qutrit. An additional photon at Alice’s end—also in a 3D quantum state—provided the state to be teleported.

The researchers made this third photon interfere with Alice’s half of the entangled pair and performed a state measurement on all three. This measurement resulted in the transfer of the 3D state to the photon held by Bob.

The scheme may be useful in high-speed quantum communications, since a qutrit can carry more information than a qubit. The approach could be generalized to teleport quantum states involving any degree of freedom with more than two levels (photon orbital angular momentum, for example).

The researchers suggest that they could extend their scheme to an arbitrarily high number of dimensions by adding more paths for the photons.

These features could eventually allow the complete state of a complex quantum particle to be transferred.

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff