The Physics World Breakthrough of the Year 2015 award, which recognizes outstanding physics research, goes to a team of researchers who were the first to achieve quantum teleportation of two physical properties of an elementary particle – the photon.
The prize will be awarded to Chaoyang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan, from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, for their research, published in Nature in February of this year.
Quantum teleportation – background
In 1993 an international group of physicists proved theoretically that the teleportation of a quantum state is possible, so long as the original state being copied is destroyed – one of the laws of quantum mechanics (the “no-cloning” theorem) dictates that a quantum state cannot be perfectly copied.
The first experimental teleportation of a photon polarization was achieved in 1997 – a project Pan was involved in – and many other entities have been transferred since then. But all of these experiments were limited to teleporting a single property and scaling that up to even two properties has proved to be a herculean feat, until now.
Jian-Wei Pan said he was “very excited indeed” for his work to be chosen as the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year, by a panel of four Physics World editors and reporters.
Chaoyang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan were the first to achieve reliable quantum teleportation of two physical properties of photons – they transferred a photon’s spin (polarization) and its orbital angular momentum (how its wave front rotates) to another photonsome distance away.
“Quantum teleportation has been recognized as a key element in the ongoing development of long-distance quantum communications that provide unbreakable security, ultrafast quantum computers and quantum networks,”Jian-Wei Pan said.
Quantum teleportation is expected to play an important role in the development of quantum computers and quantum cryptography systems, which use the properties of photons, atoms and other quantum systems to store, process information much faster than conventional computers.
Successfully teleporting a quantum state involves precisely measuring a system’s state, transmitting that information to a distant location and then reconstructing a flawless copy of the original state. A complete perfect transfer is done when the first particle loses all of the properties that are teleported to the other.
Although it is possible to extend Pan's method to teleport more than two properties simultaneously, this becomes increasingly difficult with each added property, also described as a ‘degree of freedom’. To do this would require the ability to experimentally control 10 photons. The current record is eight.
The team is working hard to change that, though, and Pan says that they “hope to reach 10-photon entanglement in a few months”. Pan and his team hope to double that figure to 20 within the next three years. “We should be able to teleport three degrees of freedom of a single photon or multiple photons soon,” he adds.
The Physics World Breakthrough of the Year Award
The Physics World Breakthrough of the Year Award is presented each year to an outstanding research endeavour.
Last year ESA’s Rosetta mission won the award for the remarkable feat of landing a spacecraft on a comet while acquiring a wealth of scientific data.
In 2013 the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory won for making the first observations of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. But please don’t think that all the winning research is done by large collaborations.
Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto were winners in 2011 for their bench-top experimental work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, while the inaugural prize in 2009 went to Jonathan Home and colleagues at NIST for creating the first small-scale device that could be described as a quantum computer.
A detailed explanation of Pan and Lu’s experiment here:
Video – How does quantum teleportation work? http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/multimedia/2012/aug/22/how-does-quantum-teleportation-work
Ten achievements were shortlisted for the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year Award, celebrating research from teams and institutions across the world.
The other nine research achievements (in no particular order) that made the shortlist were:
Cyclotron radiation from a single electron is measured for the first time
Cyclotron radiation from a single election was measured for the first time by a collaborative effort in the US and Germany. Physicists from Karlsruhe and several US universities set up Project 8 to measure radiation from individual electrons emitted during the beta decay of krypton-83.
This radiation is emitted as the electron passes through a magnetic field and allows the team to make a very precise measurement of the energy at which the particle is emitted during beta decay.
Project 8 is now working to improve the precision of their measurement so it can be used to calculate one of the most elusive quantities in physics – the mass of the electron antineutrinos.
Weyl fermions are spotted at long last
Zahid Hasan of Princeton University, Marin Soljacic of MIT and Hongming Weng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were shortlisted for their pioneering work on massless particles known as Weyl fermions, which could be used in quantum computers in the future.
Physicists claim 'loophole-free' Bell-violation experiment
Bas Hensen, Ronald Hanson and colleagues at the Delft University of Technology made the shortlist for making a measurement of Bell’s inequality that is simultaneously free from both the locality and detection loopholes. Their research has confirmed the existence of the seemingly bizarre concept of quantum-mechanical entanglement.
First visible light detected directly from an exoplanet
Jorge Martins of the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, the University of Porto and the European Southern Observatory and colleagues in Portugal, France, Switzerland and Chile were shortlisted for being the first to measure the spectrum of visible light that has been reflected from an exoplanet.
LHCb claims discovery of two pentaquarks
The LHCb collaboration at CERN made the shortlist for showing that five quarks can be bound together in particles called pentaquarks. Two pentaquarks with masses around 4400 MeV/c2 emerged from proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider earlier this year.
Hydrogen sulphide is warmest ever superconductor at 203 K
Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Johannes Gutenberg University – both in Mainz, Germany – made the shortlist for discovering the first material that is a superconductor at a temperature that can occur naturally on the surface of the Earth.
The discovery could pave the way to the holy grail of superconductors: a material that is a superconductor at room temperature.
Portable 'battlefield MRI' comes out of the lab
Michelle Espy and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US were shortlisted for creating a practical, portable ultralow-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system.
With its low power requirements and lightweight construction, the team hopes that its prototype design can soon be deployed for use in medical centres in developing countries as well as in military field hospitals.
Fermionic microscope sees first light
Lawrence Cheuk, Martin Zwierlein and colleagues at MIT were shortlisted for building the first “fermionic microscope” – a device that is capable of imaging up to 1000 individual atoms in an ultracold gas. The fermionic microscope will allow physicists to observe the behaviour of individual fermions in the gas is cools.
Silicon quantum logic gate is a first
Andrew Dzurak, Menno Veldhorst and colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Keio University in Japan were shortlisted for creating the first quantum-logic device made from silicon.
The device uses electron spin to store quantum information and the researchers now plan to scale up the technology to create a full-scale quantum-computer chip.
