Researchers at the University of Oxford have made a big leap in quantum computing. They’ve created a scalable quantum supercomputer that can perform quantum teleportation.
This advancement tackles a major challenge in quantum technology—the scalability problem. The team believes this breakthrough could change the game for next-generation quantum computers.
Quantum computing isn’t brand new. It has been in the works for decades, but only now are we seeing real progress toward usable technology.
Instead of traditional bits, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits. These qubits can be both ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ at the same time, thanks to a phenomenon called superposition. This unique property could make quantum computers vastly more powerful than today’s best supercomputers.
Although this isn’t the first instance of quantum teleportation, it is the first time scientists have used it to transfer logical gates—key components of algorithms—across a network. This could lay the groundwork for a future ‘quantum internet,’ a highly secure network for communication and computation.
Dougal Main, who led the study, explained, “Previous demonstrations have only focused on transferring quantum states between separate systems. Our work shows we can also create interactions between these distant systems, allowing us to perform logical quantum operations across separate computers.”
This breakthrough means researchers can connect different quantum processors to act like a single, powerful quantum computer.
The team also demonstrated that the technology needed to scale this quantum system is already available. Professor David Lucas, another key member of the research team, emphasized, “Our findings show that network-distributed quantum information processing is possible with current technology. However, scaling it up will still be a huge technical challenge that needs a lot of work in both physics and engineering.”
The findings were featured in the journal Nature under the title ‘Distributed quantum computing across an optical network link’.
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