Scientists make Einsteins spooky quantum communication a reality

Physicists at the University of Michigan have made an advance toward super-fast quantum computing, which could also pave the way for making quantum Internet a reality.

Washington, Sept 6 : Physicists at the University of Michigan have made an advance toward super-fast quantum computing, which could also pave the way for making quantum Internet a reality.

The scientists coaxed two separate atoms to communicate with a sort of quantum intuition that Albert Einstein had called "spooky".

They used light to establish what's called "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped a metre apart in separate enclosures.

"This linkage between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Prof. Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator who did this research while at U-M, but is now at the University of Maryland.

"Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing," he said.

Lead author of the paper, David Moehring, now at the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany, said the most important feature of the experiment was the distance between the two atoms.

"The separation of the qubits in our entangled state is the most important feature. Localized entanglement has been performed in ion trap qubits in the past, but if one desires to build a scalable quantum computer network (or a quantum internet), the creation of entanglement schemes between remotely entangled qubit memories is necessary," said Moehring.

In the experiment, the researchers used two atoms to function as qubits, or quantum bits, storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process.

The atoms, which were actually ions of the rare-earth element ytterbium, are capable of emitting two different types of photon of different wavelengths. The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom.

By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fibre optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms.

A paper on the findings appears in the Sept 6 edition of the journal Nature.

ANI