5 Oct 2022

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes wishes to congratulate Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna, Austria) who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 for his experiments since 2006 on transmission of entangled photons over large distances from the Roque de Los Muchachos and Teide observatories. This pioneering work helped lay the foundations for future secure quantum-encrypted communication.

The first experiments carried out in 2006 were followed by a more sophisticated setup in 2012 allowing Zeilinger's team to establish the teleportation of quantum states at a record distance of 143 km. This time they used, on one side, the facilities of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), and more specifically, the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT), and on the other side, the 1-meter Optical Ground Station of the European Space Agency in the Teide Observatory on Tenerife (see Quantum Teleportation Experiment Sets a New Record).

In 2018, the team used the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) to carry out an unusual experiment aimed at plugging a loophole in the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics. This involved pointing both telescopes at distant quasars on opposite sides of the sky, and using the properties of the detected photons to trigger polarisation measurements on a pair of entangled photons generated near the NOT (and fired towards the WHT and TNG). The results confirmed the predictions of quantum mechanics (see Quantum Entanglement Confirmed with Light from Distant Quasars).

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Stabilising laser being launched in 2012 from the roof of the JKT building. Initial experiments with entangled photons were performed in 2007, but teleportation of quantum states could only be achieved in 2012 by improving the performance of the setup.