Scientists teleport images in ‘Star Trek’ discovery
Researchers claim to have figured out how to “teleport” images across a network without physically sending them.
An international team from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain performed the feat using laser light patterns and an optical detector that harnessed quantum processes.
The bizarre principles of quantum physics allowed the information of the image to appear on the receiver’s end without having to physically travel from the sender.
“Traditionally, two communicating parties physically send the information from one to the other, even in the quantum realm,” said Andrew Forbes, a professor at Wits University who led the research.
“Now, it’s possible to teleport information so that it never physically travels across the connection – a ‘Star Trek’ technology made real.”
The achievement offers a glimpse at the potential of quantum communications, an emerging field of science that could allow data to be sent across distances far greater than modern telecommunication systems currently offer.
In 2017, Chinese scientists were able to “teleport” a photon particle from the ground to an orbiting satellite roughly 1,400km away, which was hailed at the time for furthering research into unhackable communications networks.
The researchers behind the latest breakthrough pushed this field far further, but warned that the technology could potentially be misused by nefarious actors to make clones.
“We have to be cautious now, as this configuration could not prevent a cheating sender from keeping better copies of the information to be teleported, which means we could end up with many Mr Spock clones in the Star Trek world if that is what Scotty wanted,” said Dr Adam Vallés from ICFO, who was one of the leads on the project.
“We hope that this experiment showing the feasibility of the process motivates further advances in the nonlinear optics community through pushing the limits towards a full quantum implementation.”
The research was published in a study titled ‘Quantum transport of high-dimensional spatial information with a nonlinear detector’, which appeared in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications.
