World First: Quantum Teleportation Achieved Between Photons, Scientists Confirm - ScienceAlert

Measurement-based quantum computing and memory-less quantum repeaters are key areas of research. Although some initial examples have been successfully prepared, creating large-scale graph states with programmable connections at scale remains an outstanding challenge. Fusion offers a promising “divide-and-conquer” approach by linking smaller resource states into larger, more complex graphs. However, its practical scalability has been limited by the probabilistic nature of conventional fusion protocols, requiring extensive hardware overhead and feed-forward resources to achieve deterministic outcomes. A deterministic fusion operation with built-in error correction is introduced and experimentally demonstrated. Entanglement now extends to 13 qubits, surpassing prior demonstrations limited to 12, and opens possibilities for more complex quantum calculations; earlier methods struggled with topological complexity as entanglement scaled up. Researchers at Hefei National Laboratory and Tsinghua University achieved this milestone using a deterministic fusion operation that connects smaller entangled states into larger, reconfigurable structures via superconducting circuits.

Quantum entanglement captures one of the strangest differences between everyday physics and the quantum world. In an entangled system, particles such as photons become linked so deeply that their properties cannot be fully described independently. Instead, the system must be treated as a whole. That idea clashes with the classical expectation that each particle should possess its own separate physical reality, a feature of quantum mechanics that famously troubled Albert Einstein. Yet entanglement is now considered one of the essential ingredients for emerging quantum technologies, including advanced communication, computing, and information transfer.

Using IBM's quantum computer, scientists say they have shown in three different experiments that quantum computers can outpace classical machines in useful computations.