East China Normal University Pushes Quantum Teleportation to 100 Channels Simultaneously

Forum topic · 小凯 · 2026-08-21

Summary

Researchers at East China Normal University (ECNU), led by Jing Jietao and Liu Shengshuai, have demonstrated 100-channel reconfigurable quantum teleportation, published in Physical Review Letters Vol. 137, 080801 (DOI: 10.1103/rfz9-3prw) and selected as an Editors' Suggestion. The experiment uses a 10×10 spatial light modulator array with a weighted Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm to generate 100 independently controllable spatial modes, each paired with its own entangled photon resource, and employs a measurement-free all-optical feedforward scheme. A 10×10 pixel image was teleported in one step, with every channel's fidelity surpassing the classical limit of 2/3 for a qubit. Compared with prior teleportation experiments that handle a single quantum state at a time, this work scales concurrent channels by two orders of magnitude, addressing a key bandwidth bottleneck for quantum internet applications including secure image transfer, quantum multiparty computation, and distributed quantum computing. Next challenges include scaling to thousands of channels, extending transmission distance beyond the benchtop scale, and integrating with existing QKD and quantum computing platforms.

ECNU Demonstrates 100-Channel Quantum Teleportation in a Single Step

Published on 20 August 2026 in *Physical Review Letters* (PRL) Vol. 137, 080801, the paper "Hundred-Channel Reconfigurable Quantum Teleportation" (DOI: 10.1103/rfz9-3prw) was produced by a collaboration between Jing Jietao's and Liu Shengshuai's teams at East China Normal University (ECNU). The work was selected as a PRL Editors' Suggestion, and APS's *Physics* magazine highlighted it the same day with a Synopsis titled "Teleporting More Quantum States at Once".

Why it matters

For three decades, experimental quantum teleportation has largely remained at the "one state per round" level. To move more complex payloads — for instance, an image — researchers typically had two options:

Serialize many independent teleportation channels, or
Use wavelength-division or time-division multiplexing inside a single channel.

Both approaches force the receiver into complex decoding and make per-channel independent control difficult for the sender.

ECNU's approach ditches multiplexing and exploits natural spatial separability: 100 independent quantum channels are arranged on a 10×10 optical array, with each channel corresponding to one "pixel" of the image.

How it works

The experiment can be broken into three modules.

1. Generating 100 independent channels. A spatial light modulator (SLM) shapes the transverse profile of a laser beam into a 10×10 grid of distinct, independently controllable spatial modes. The grid can be configured to represent any arbitrary 10×10-pixel image. The specific algorithm used is the weighted Gerchberg–Saxton algorithm, an iterative phase-retrieval method commonly used for holograms and optical trap arrays.

2. Pairing 100 entangled photons. Each spatial mode requires its own entangled photon pair as the teleportation resource. The team supplied 100 such pairs at once, all naturally spatially separable — meaning the 100 channels are mutually independent without any WDM/TDM scheme.

3. Measurement-free all-optical feedforward. This is the key innovation. Conventional teleportation requires the sender to perform a Bell-state measurement on the input state and one half of the entangled pair, then communicate the result over a classical channel so the receiver can apply a corresponding unitary. ECNU's design removes the measurement step entirely, replacing it with a purely optical feedforward path. All 100 channels are teleported simultaneously, with each channel independently controllable. The trade-off is a more complex optical layout; the payoff is full parallelism.

As a result, a 100-mode optical array carrying a 10×10-pixel image was successfully teleported, with fidelity exceeding the classical limit on every channel.

Why "above the classical limit" is significant

Without shared entanglement, the sender can only transmit information classically. For a single qubit, the classical fidelity ceiling is 2/3 (and a corresponding limit applies for higher channel counts). Once teleportation fidelity exceeds this threshold, the transmission is genuinely quantum — using entanglement rather than simply "copying" classical information.

That all 100 channels individually crossed the classical limit means each channel independently demonstrated true quantum transport, ruling out cross-channel cheating.

Implications for the quantum internet

Quantum teleportation is the physical substrate of the quantum internet, whose goal is to move quantum states and entanglement between network nodes in ways classical networks cannot. Over the past decade, a central bottleneck has been bandwidth: each teleportation channel carries only one state, and scaling up requires stacking channels or stacking time until overall throughput collapses.

ECNU's scheme raises concurrent channels from 1 to 100 with each channel independently controllable — effectively lifting teleportation throughput by an order of magnitude.

Near-term applications:

Quantum-secure image / video transmission
Quantum-secure multi-party computation
Quantum key distribution (QKD) networks, which today carry only classical keys, not quantum states

Longer-term impact:

Distributed quantum computing: linking small quantum processors via a quantum network into a "quantum supercomputer." The core difficulty here — transferring quantum states between processors — gains a high-bandwidth solution.

International comparison

| Group | Focus | | --- | --- | | US NIST / IBM | Qubit-level teleportation; intra-quantum-computer entanglement distribution | | Caltech (2024–2025) | Long-distance / ground-to-satellite teleportation | | Anton Zeilinger group, University of Vienna (2022 Nobel laureate) | Multimode / multichannel teleportation explorations | | NTT, Japan | Fiber-based medium- and long-distance teleportation | | ECNU | High channel count with natural separability — no complex decoding |

The combination of "high channel count + natural separability" can be viewed as a key step in moving teleportation from a scientific demonstration apparatus to a scalable communication scheme.

Three factors that shape what comes next

1. Channel count. Can the architecture scale to 1,000 or 10,000 channels? The authors explicitly note that the number of "pixels" can in principle be significantly increased — but real-world scaling depends on further optical miniaturization and photon-loss reduction. 2. Transmission distance. The current experiment is benchtop-scale, with channel separations on the order of centimeters. Practical quantum networks require meter-, kilometer-, or even satellite–ground scale distances. 3. System compatibility. Wavelength, optical components, and entangled photon engineering must all be adapted to integrate with existing QKD networks and quantum-computing platforms — a routine but nontrivial industrialization hurdle.

Conclusion

The most important aspect of the August 20, 2026 PRL paper is not the number 100 itself but the shift it represents: teleportation is leaving the "one state at a time" regime and entering a "one batch at a time" engineering regime. This is arguably the most substantial industrialization leap in quantum teleportation research in three decades.

Near-term applications — quantum internet, distributed quantum computing, quantum-secured imaging, quantum-secured multi-party computation — remain in the demonstration or proof-of-concept stage. But by tearing open the throughput bottleneck, 100-channel teleportation is enabling them. The next milestones: scaling channels to 1,000 and 10,000, extending distances to meters and kilometers, and delivering engineering compatibility. Once those are achieved, the quantum internet will transition from a scientist's toy to industrial infrastructure.

For China's broader quantum-information ecosystem, the result also reinforces international competitiveness, following milestones such as the Zuchongzhi 3.2 superconducting quantum computing achievement and Jiuzhang 4 photonic quantum computing breakthrough.