University of Oxford: Teleportation Has Finally Become a Reality

They’ve Done It At The University of Oxford: Teleportation Has Finally Become a Reality

Not so fast, though. If you were hoping to beam yourself straight to the office, you will still need to squeeze into the metro or hop on the bus. And for now, it is only in New York that public transit is expected to become free. What has truly “jumped” from one point in space to another is information.

Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Star Trek: countless sagas have turned teleportation into a pop culture staple, to the point of making it a full-fledged convention of science fiction. While scientists still have no way to move matter itself from point A to point B, researchers at the University of Oxford have managed to teleport a quantum program from one computer to another without any particle travelling between the two processors.

In a study published in the journal Nature, the team details how it pulled off this transfer of information using quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in the subatomic world in which two particles form a single information system, even when they are separated in space.

When two computers talk instantly

To grasp what is at stake in this experiment, it helps to return to the basics of quantum computing. Unlike conventional computing, where data are encoded in bits that take the value 0 or 1, quantum computing relies on qubits, particles that can exist in several states at once, being 0 and 1 simultaneously. This is quantum superposition, the principle that gives quantum machines their spectacular computing power.

However, when several qubits are in superposition, their states become so deeply linked that they can no longer be described independently. In physics, this is known as quantum entanglement.

As the researchers explain, this strange property is precisely what they exploited. Once two qubits are entangled, they remain correlated: a change to one is reflected instantly in the other.

Harnessing this effect, the Oxford team linked two quantum processors placed two metres apart using “light qubits” – entangled photons. The state of the first photon on the first processor was directly tied to the state of its twin on the second. The moment a quantum operation was applied to the first, the corresponding state appeared on the second, without any physical signal or transfer connecting them.

No matter was transported during the experiment. Only the quantum state of the light signal – the one that carries out the computation – was transmitted. In other words, the information was perfectly copied from one system to another without resorting to any conventional transmission infrastructure such as cables, optical fibres or radio waves. In the strict physical sense, this is indeed teleportation: quantum teleportation.

No matter was transported during the experiment. Only the quantum state of the light signal – the one that carries out the computation – was transmitted.

The future of supercomputing

For now, this remains a laboratory demonstration. But it offers a small-scale glimpse of what many in the field are aiming for: distributed quantum computing. The idea is to interconnect multiple quantum processors so they can share resources, states and calculations in real time, behaving like a single universal machine spread across the globe.

Links

• First distributed quantum algorithm brings quantum supercomputers closer – The University of Oxford
• Sell your pre-owned Quantum device online – iGotOffer

Quantum Teleportation Is Real?! Oxford’s Breakthrough Explained [Video]

Video uploaded by IonTek on May 14, 2025.