## Quantum Teleportation Explained

Difficulty

by Jérémy Ribeiro

Have you ever dreamt about teleportation? You wonder if it is possible, or if we can use it to travel faster than light, or at least to communicate instantaneously. Then you are at the good place. Here I will explain what quantum teleportation is. Behind this very attractive name that reminds us of science fiction, a communication protocol is hidden which uses the mysterious quantum mechanics.

## Why do I talk about quantum teleportation ?

I wanted to write about this protocol because we hear a lot about it and a lot of information and explanations can be found about it. But sometimes those are partially wrong, or are a complete nonsense. For example we can read that quantum teleportation is an instantaneous transfer of information at a distance which respects special relativity… Well this is a contradiction.

These misconceptions of the protocol are not surprising since it relies on one of the most ununderstandable and less well understood phenomenon of quantum mechanics: the famous entanglement.

That’s why I will try to clarify what this notorious quantum teleportation actually is. For that I will have to introduce a little bit of quantum mechanics. Therefore there will be some mathematical expressions, but I’ll guide you through it to make you understand what is going on. It shouldn’t be too difficult since you should have already seen all the mathematical concepts in high school (vectors), and I think it is worth it and permits to really understand what quantum teleportation is.

So what is that quantum teleportation ?

The first thing to understand is that we only teleport a quantum state (we will call it $\Phi$), and not a particle nor any other kind of matter. Only information is transmitted from one place to another. So somehow we will scan the physical system in the first place (which will destroy the state), send the information (by phone, internet or any other way of communication) to an other place and there reconstruct the state. But to do that there are some obstacles. The main obstacle the “scanning phase” is not trivial since we cannot (by the law of quantum mechanics) get all the
information on a state by measuring it, as I will explain later, but only partial information. To overcome that we will need to use a correlated state which will somehow compensate the lack of information.

## Media Misconceptions: Quantum versus Classical Computers

Difficulty

by Christian Dickel

It is an honor to write the first blog post here and being conscious of that certainly influenced what I was going to write about. They say write what you know, but this is a blog so I’m going to write what I think. The blog will hopefully be a place for opinions and discussions. So I’ll begin with a question:

Do physics institutes need blogs? Certainly it is a neat additional way to communicate with other scientists, especially to share more provocative thoughts and give people a chance to discuss in the comments. But science is kind of a gated community and a blog is a nice way to open it more. For communication with the rest of society, journalists often come in whenever some piece of science has an air of general interest. But especially in a field receiving a lot of interest and a lot of funding from the public, we should try to explain what we do directly to anybody who is interested enough to end up on our website. A blog is a chance for us to share and discuss our perspective on the story of quantum computing as it is being written.

## Quantum computers and the media

There are news article on quantum computing almost weekly somewhere on the internet and one can use them to follow the story of the quantum computer. But the news has a certain inertia and a need to fit complicated arguments into a single sentence or paragraph. Some of the one-liners are productive simplifications, but they can also be misleading. Exploring all the misconceptions about quantum computing requires more than one blog article. I considered going through the list found here and fact-checking it, but this blog article would not have been very serious then. I thought it better for the first blog article to be a link from the past to today and focus on a single aspect that annoys me in the way the quantum computer story is told: I will try to give a more nuanced view on the relationship between the classical and quantum computer. Maybe later there will be more blog articles on other common misconceptions about quantum computers.