As our world gets connected by global networks of fibers and terrestrial links, exchange of information serves as the backbone of our modern society. Achieving this with high-dimensional states promises higher information capacity, but progress in this field has been limited. Quantum technologies could possibly enable such kinds of exchange to be more fundamentally secure.
Quantum communication over long distances is important to information security. It has been demonstrated with two-dimensional states over very long distances between satellites. This seems enough compared to its classical counterpart such as sending bits of information one at a time.
Moreover, quantum optics allows experts to securely describe more complex systems in a shot, such as a face or a unique fingerprint. In the traditional setting, two communicating parties send the information physically from one to the other, even in the quantum realm.
It is now possible to teleport information without physically traveling across the connection. Unfortunately, it has only been demonstrated with 3D states which means that it needs additional entangled photons to reach higher dimensions.
A research by experts from Wits University and The Institute of Photonic Sciences has demonstrated the transport of patterns of light which resembles teleportation. The study, reported in the paper "Quantum transport of high-dimensional spatial information with a nonlinear detector" is the first attempt to transport images across a network without physically sending the image. It also serves as an important step towards realizing a quantum network for high-dimensional entangled states.
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