For the first time ever, scientists have achieved direct counterfactual quantum communication. This type of quantum communication is where no particles travel between recipients and physicists have finally been able to achieve it in the lab as they successfully transferred a black and white bitmap image from one place to another without ant particles being sent across.
Direct counterfactual quantum communication differs from regular quantum communication (quantum teleportation) for a few reasons. The main one being that regular quantum teleportation is based on entanglement and relies on particle transmission in some form or another. That’s not the case with direct counterfactual quantum communication. Here a phenomenon called quantum Zeno effect comes into play.
The Zeno effect is the transferring of a quantum state from one site to another without any particles transferring between them. It requires a quantum channel to run between two sites and is quite a complex system. But in order to carry out the experiment, researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China placed two single-photon detectors in the output ports of the end of an array of beam splitters. The system then freezes in a certain state because of the quantum Zeno effect. This makes it possible for the researchers to predict which detectors would click whenever photons passed through.
Holography technology was where the team took their basic idea for the experiment from. They wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “In the 1940’s a new imaging technique – holography – was developed to record not only light intensity but also the phase of light. One may then pose the question: Can the phase of light itself be used for imaging? The answer is yes.”
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