Kazuki Ikeda, a researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University in New York, has just announced the first experimental demonstration of quantum energy teleportation. Which, according to the researcher, opens the doors to an authentic technological revolution of unforeseen consequences.
As Ikeda explains in an article that appeared on the Arxiv prepublication server, the milestone would have been achieved with the help of a series of IBM quantum computers. The study, not yet peer-reviewed and pending publication in a scientific journal, has nevertheless aroused the interest of numerous researchers.
As we understand it today, teleportation does not consist, as science fiction movies suggest, in dematerializing an object in one place and re-materializing it in another distant place, but rather in sending quantum information (the intrinsic properties of a particle subatomic) from one place to another but without crossing the space that separates them. Something that is possible thanks to a unique property of the subatomic world, the ‘quantum entanglement’, thanks to which two entangled particles instantly ‘communicate’ with each other no matter how far apart they are, so that any change that occurs in one of the particles is immediately reflected in the other.
Upon receiving the information, in fact, the second particle acquires all the characteristics of the first, from which it becomes indistinguishable. In practice, it is as if the first particle had instantly traveled from one place to another in the Universe. It may seem strange, but today quantum teleportation is routine in physics laboratories around the world, and it has become an essential technology for the development of computing and the quantum internet.
teleport energy
But there is another possible, so far theoretical, use of quantum teleportation, one that could change the world like few things have done so far: teleport energy. In 2008, the Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta, from Tohoku University, developed a theory that allowed the teleportation of energy by taking advantage of vacuum states. The idea suggested that these states are not really empty, but instead contain particles that fluctuate, continually appearing and disappearing from reality. And, most importantly, some of those particles are entangled. A few years later, in 2014, the same researcher improved on his theory and proposed a new method for teleporting energy over long distances. Something purely theoretical, since Hotta’s studies did not materialize in laboratory experiments.
Now, however, Kazuki Ikeda claims to have taken this step by getting, for the first time, teleport energy using an ordinary quantum computer. «We report -he writes in his article- about the first realization and observation of quantum energy teleportation in real quantum hardware». Something that, he adds, will have “profound implications” for the quantum Internet of the future.
The key is in the quantum fluctuations
Ikeda starts from Hotta’s previous ideas and maintains that the key that allows the quantum teleportation of energy is its continuous fluctuations, inherent to any quantum system. Fluctuations, says the researcher, which can be exploited to our advantage. As Hotta pointed out in his previous works, the mere fact of measuring a quantum system injects a certain amount of energy into it, but that energy can be extracted from a different part of the system without the energy having to travel through the intervening space. .
Demonstrating this idea, however, requires the presence of entangled particles, very difficult to achieve when Hotta formulated his theories but in common use today. In fact, quantum computers are based on superconducting qubits (quantum bits), which can be accessed via the Internet. Ikeda simply wrote the quantum algorithm that puts Hotta’s idea into practice and then used an IBM quantum computer to run it. “The results – he writes – are consistent with the exact solution of the theory.”
Possible with current technology
In his experiment, carried out inside a quantum computer, Ikeda was only able to teleport energy to distances equivalent to the size of a chip from the computer itself. But once the idea is proven, the researcher points out, it should be possible to instantly teleport energy over much greater distances.
According to Ikeda, their results “provide a realistic benchmark that is fully achievable with current quantum computing and communication technologies,” adding that their study demonstrates that local operations and classical communication are the only requirements necessary for the teleportation of quantum energy. To test this, Ikeda suggests using existing links that are used for conventional quantum teleportation. For example, his University (Stony Brook) has such a link 158 km long, to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
On the implications of his finding, Ikeda states that “the ability to transfer quantum energy over long distances will spark a new revolution in quantum communications technology.” The researcher adds that his results imply the birth of a new field in economics, that of quantum information that “will become an important idea in the future.”
But there is still more. In his article, in fact, in addition to his successful quantum energy transfer, Ikeda also reports the observation of negative energy, according to him “the most significant achievement in this study”, given its potential applications in the study of the gravitational field and the quantum field phenomena.