On August 20, *Physical Review Letters* (PRL) published "Hundred-Channel Reconfigurable Quantum Teleportation" (Vol. 137, 080801; DOI: 10.1103/rfz9-3prw) by teams at East China Normal University led by Jie-Tai Jing and Shengshuai Liu. The paper was selected as a PRL Editors' Suggestion, and *Physics* (published by the American Physical Society) featured it the same day in a Synopsis titled "Teleporting More Quantum States at Once."
The work moves quantum teleportation from "one quantum state at a time" to 100 independent quantum states simultaneously — using a 10×10 "image" as the payload — with teleportation fidelity exceeding the classical limit.
Quantum teleportation transfers an unknown quantum state from point A to point B using entangled photon pairs pre-shared between sender and receiver, without physically transmitting the particle itself. For three decades, experiments remained at the "one quantum state at a time" level. Sending complex information (such as an image) required either multiple serial teleportation channels or wavelength/time multiplexing — both of which force complex decoding on the receiver and make independent channel control difficult for the sender.
This work bypasses multiplexing entirely, using "natural spatial separability": 100 independent quantum channels arranged directly in a 10×10 optical array, each channel corresponding to one "pixel."
How it works: SLM + weighted Gerchberg-Saxton + measurement-free all-optical feedforward
1. Creating 100 independent channels. The researchers used a spatial light modulator (SLM) to shape a laser beam's transverse profile into a grid of 10×10 distinct spatial modes, each independently controllable and together capable of forming arbitrary 10×10-pixel images. The grid was generated with the weighted Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm, an iterative phase-retrieval algorithm commonly used for holograms and optical trap arrays.
2. Preparing 100 entangled photon pairs. Each spatial mode corresponds to an independent quantum channel, and each channel requires an entangled photon pair as its teleportation resource. The team prepared 100 pairs simultaneously — naturally spatially separable, with no wavelength- or time-division multiplexing needed.
3. Measurement-free all-optical feedforward. This is the key innovation. Conventional teleportation requires the sender to perform a Bell-state measurement, with results sent classically to the receiver, who applies a corresponding unitary correction. This scheme removes the measurement step entirely, replacing it with all-optical feedforward — all 100 channels teleport in parallel, purely optically, without measurement. The cost is a more complex optical setup; the benefit is full parallelism and independent control of every channel.
The result: both a 100-mode optical array and a 10×10-pixel image were successfully teleported, with fidelity exceeding the corresponding classical limit.
Why "beyond the classical limit" matters
Without genuinely shared entanglement, the best classical strategy caps teleportation fidelity at 2/3 for a single qubit (or the corresponding limit per channel). Exceeding this bound proves the transmission genuinely exploited entanglement rather than simply copying information — the defining hallmark of quantum teleportation. All 100 channels simultaneously exceeding the limit means every channel independently demonstrated "truly quantum" transport.
When will the quantum internet use this?
Quantum teleportation is the physical foundation of the quantum internet, whose goal is securely transferring quantum states and entanglement between network nodes — something the classical internet cannot do.
The core bottleneck of the past decade has been bandwidth: each teleportation channel carried a single quantum state. By lifting the concurrent channel count from 1 to 100, with independent control of each channel, this work raises teleportation throughput by an order of magnitude.
Short term, the most meaningful application is quantum image transfer — quantum-secure images, quantum-encrypted video, and quantum-secure multiparty computation. QKD networks, already deployed in many countries, can only carry classical keys, not quantum states; teleportation networks remain far less mature, but a hundred-channel scheme could make them practical in specific scenarios.
Longer term, the work is key to distributed quantum computing — linking small quantum processors into a "quantum supercomputer" — whose central challenge is precisely high-bandwidth quantum state transfer between processors.
International context
US NIST/IBM work focuses on qubit teleportation for entanglement distribution within quantum computing; Caltech teams demonstrated long-distance teleportation in 2024–2025 targeting ground–satellite links; Anton Zeilinger's group at the University of Vienna (2022 Nobel laureate) has explored multimode/multichannel schemes; Japan's NTT focuses on medium-to-long-distance fiber teleportation. The East China Normal University approach stands out by pushing the channel count to 100 with natural separability and no complex decoding — arguably a key step moving teleportation from "scientific apparatus" toward a "scalable communication scheme."
Three things that decide what comes next
1. Scaling channels to 1,000 or 10,000. The paper notes: "In the future, scientists predict that the number of 'pixels' in the device can be significantly increased, which will further enhance the capacity of quantum communication networks." This depends on further miniaturizing the optical structure and reducing photon loss. 2. Distance, from tabletop to practical. The current experiment is tabletop-scale, with centimeter-level channel separations. Practical networks require meters, kilometers, or satellite–ground distances. 3. Compatibility with practical systems. Integration with existing QKD networks and quantum computing platforms will require substantial engineering adaptation — a common bottleneck in translating basic research to industry.
At the threshold of practicality
The significance of this PRL paper lies less in the number 100 itself than in the shift from "one at a time" demonstrations to "one batch at a time" practicality — arguably the most substantive engineering leap in thirty years of quantum teleportation research. Applications such as the quantum internet, distributed quantum computing, quantum-secure images, and quantum-secure multiparty computation remain at the demonstration or proof-of-concept stage, but the hundred-channel scheme has torn open the throughput bottleneck. Scaling channels, extending distance, and achieving engineering compatibility would move the quantum internet from "scientists' toy" to "industrial infrastructure."
Within China's quantum information landscape, following the Zuchongzhi 3.2 superconducting quantum computing breakthrough and the Jiuzhang 4.0 photonic quantum computing advance by Pan Jianwei's team, this work reinforces China's position in the top tier of international quantum communication research.