(May 28, 2015) Putting
a hole in the center of the donut—a mid-nineteenth-century invention—allows the
deep-fried pastry to cook evenly, inside and out. As it turns out, the hole in
the center of the donut also holds answers for a type of more efficient and
reliable quantum information teleportation, a critical goal for quantum
information science.
Quantum teleportation is a method of communicating
information from one location to another without moving the physical matter to
which the information is attached. Instead, the sender (Alice) and the receiver
(Bob) share a pair of entangled elementary particles—in this experiment,
photons, the smallest units of light—that transmit information through their
shared quantum state. In simplified terms, Alice encodes information in the
form of the quantum state of her photon. She then sends a key to Bob over
traditional communication channels, indicating what operation he must perform
on his photon to prepare the same quantum state, thus teleporting the
information.