Abstract
If a photon interacts with a member of an entangled photon pair via a Bell-state measurement (BSM), its state is teleported over principally arbitrary distances onto the pair's second member1. Since 1997, this puzzling prediction of quantum mechanics has been demonstrated many times2. However, with two exceptions3,4, only the photon that received the teleported state, if any, travelled far, while the photons partaking in the BSM were always measured close to where they were created. Here, using the Calgary fibre network, we report quantum teleportation from a telecom photon at 1,532 nm wavelength, interacting with another telecom photon after both have travelled several kilometres and over a combined beeline distance of 8.2 km, onto a photon at 795 nm wavelength. This improves the distance over which teleportation takes place to 6.2 km. Our demonstration establishes an important requirement for quantum repeater-based communications5 and constitutes a milestone towards a global quantum internet6.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$209.00 per year
only $17.42 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bennett, C. H. et al. Teleporting an unknown quantum state via dual classical and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen channels. Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, 1895–1899 (1993).
Pirandola, S., Eisert, J., Weedbrook, C., Furusawa, A. & Braunstein, S. L. Advances in quantum teleportation. Nat. Photon. 9, 641–652 (2015).
Landry, O., van Houwelingen, J. A. W., Beveratos, A., Zbinden, H. & Gisin, N. Quantum teleportation over the Swisscom telecommunication network. J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 24, 398–403 (2007).
Hensen, B. et al. Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins separated by 1.3 kilometres. Nature 526, 682–686 (2015).
Sangouard, N., Simon, C., De Riedmatten, H. & Gisin, N. Quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 33–80 (2011).
Kimble, H. J. The quantum internet. Nature 453, 1023–1030 (2008).
Yin, J. et al. Quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over 100-kilometre free-space channels. Nature 488, 185–188 (2012).
Ma, X.-S. et al. Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward. Nature 489, 269–273 (2012).
Lvovsky, A. I., Sanders, B. C. & Tittel, W. Optical quantum memory. Nat. Photon. 3, 706–714 (2009).
Żukowski, M., Zeilinger, A., Horne, M. A. & Ekert, A. K. ‘Event-ready-detectors’ Bell experiment via entanglement swapping. Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 4287–4290 (1993).
Rubenok, A., Slater, J. A., Chan, P., Lucio-Martinez, I. & Tittel, W. Real-world two-photon interference and proof-of-principle quantum key distribution immune to detector attacks. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 130501 (2013).
Marcikic, I., De Riedmatten, H., Tittel, W., Zbinden, H. & Gisin, N. Long-distance teleportation of qubits at telecommunication wavelengths. Nature 421, 509–513 (2003).
de Riedmatten, H. et al. Long distance quantum teleportation in a quantum relay configuration. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 047904 (2004).
Bussières, F. et al. Quantum teleportation from a telecom-wavelength photon to a solid-state quantum memory. Nat. Photon. 8, 775–778 (2014).
Takesue, H. et al. Quantum teleportation over 100 km of fiber using highly efficient superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors. Optica 2, 832–835 (2015).
Ma, X. S. et al. Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping. Nat. Phys. 8, 479–484 (2012).
Megidish, E. et al. Entanglement swapping between photons that have never coexisted. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 210403 (2013).
Massar, S. & Popescu, S. Optimal extraction of information from finite quantum ensembles. Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1259–1263 (1995).
Lo, H.-K., Ma, X. & Chen, K. Decoy state quantum key distribution. Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 230504 (2005).
Wang, X. B. Beating the photon-number-splitting attack in practical quantum cryptography. Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 230503 (2005).
Sinclair, N. et al. Spectral multiplexing for scalable quantum photonics using an atomic frequency comb quantum memory and feed-forward control. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 053603 (2014).
Krovi, H. et al. Practical quantum repeaters with parametric down-conversion sources. Appl. Phys. B 122, 52 (2016).
Thiel, C. W., Sinclair, N., Tittel, W. & Cone, R. L. Optical decoherence studies of Tm3+ : Y3Ga5O12 . Phys. Rev. B 90, 214301 (2014).
Valivarthi, R. et al. Efficient Bell state analyzer for time-bin qubits with fast-recovery WSi superconducting single photon detectors. Opt. Express 22, 24497–24506 (2014).
Wavelength References Data Sheets and Pkg Drawings; http://www.wavelengthreferences.com/pdf/Data
Braunstein, S. L. & Pirandola, S. Side-channel-free quantum key distribution. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 130502 (2012).
Sun, Q.-C. et al. Quantum teleportation with independent sources and prior entanglement distribution over a network. Nat. Photon. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.179 (2016).
Brendel, J., Gisin, N., Tittel, W. & Zbinden, H. Pulsed energy-time entangled twin-photon source for quantum communication. Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 2594–2597 (1999).
Marsili, F. et al. Detecting single infrared photons with 93% system efficiency. Nat. Photon. 7, 210–214 (2013).
Hong, C. K., Ou, Z. Y. & Mandel, L. Measurement of subpicosecond time intervals between two photons by interference. Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2044–2046 (1987).
Acknowledgements
The authors thank T. Andruschak, R. Angelo, D. Basto, C. Chambers and H. Dhillon from the City of Calgary for providing access to the fibre network and for help during the experiment, V. Kiselyov for technical support and P. Lefebvre for help with aligning the entangled photon pair source. This work was funded through Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF), the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Quiness programme (contract no. W31P4Q-13-l-0004). W.T. also acknowledges funding as a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and V.B.V. and S.W.N. acknowledge partial funding for detector development from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information in a Photon (InPho) programme. Part of the detector research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
The SNSPDs were fabricated and tested by V.B.V., F.M., M.D.S. and S.W.N. The experiment was conceived and guided by W.T. The set-up was developed, measurements were performed, and the data were analysed by R.V., M.G.P., Q.Z., G.H.A. and D.O. The manuscript was written by W.T., R.V., M.G.P., Q.Z., G.H.A. and D.O.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary information
Supplementary information (PDF 797 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Valivarthi, R., Puigibert, M., Zhou, Q. et al. Quantum teleportation across a metropolitan fibre network. Nature Photon 10, 676–680 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.180
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.180
This article is cited by
-
Single-photon detection using high-temperature superconductors
Nature Nanotechnology (2023)
-
Progress in quantum teleportation
Nature Reviews Physics (2023)
-
Applications of single photons to quantum communication and computing
Nature Reviews Physics (2023)
-
Microwave-to-optical transduction with erbium ions coupled to planar photonic and superconducting resonators
Nature Communications (2023)
-
Long distance multiplexed quantum teleportation from a telecom photon to a solid-state qubit
Nature Communications (2023)