Quantum teleportation has been successfully used before to transmit photons, ions, and even between a macroscopic object and a microscopic object, “but now Chinese researchers have, for the first time, achieved quantum teleportation between two macroscopic objects across nearly 500-feet using entangled photons.” Continue reading for a video and more information.
That�s pretty huge. The two bundles of rubidium atoms that served as sender and receiver are more or less analogs for what we hope will someday be our “quantum Internet”–a system of routers like the ones we have now that, instead of beaming information around a vast network of fiber optic wires, will send and receive information through entangled photons. So in a way, this is like a first proof of concept, evidence that the idea works at least in the lab.
Now all we have to do is figure out is how to build several of these in series so they can actually pass information from one to the other. To do that, we only have to somehow force these quantum states to exist for longer than the hundred microseconds or so that they last now before degrading. Sounds easy enough.
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