Quantum teleportation with independent sources and prior entanglement distribution over a network

The first field test of quantum teleportation is implemented over a 30 km optical fibre network with independent quantum light sources. To establish a robust quantum teleportation system in the real world, several feedback mechanisms are developed. Quantum teleportation 1 faithfully transfers a quantum state between distant nodes in a network, which enables revolutionary information-processing applications 2 , 3 , 4 . This has motivated a tremendous amount of research activity 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 . However, in the past not a single quantum-teleportation experiment has been realized with independent quantum sources, entanglement distribution prior to the Bell-state measurement (BSM) and feedforward operation simultaneously, even in the laboratory environment. We take the challenge and report the construction of a 30 km optical-fibre-based quantum network distributed over a 12.5 km area. This network is robust against noise in the real world with active stabilization strategies, which allows us to realize quantum teleportation with all the ingredients simultaneously. Both the quantum-state and process-tomography measurements and an independent statistical hypothesis test confirm the quantum nature of the quantum teleportation over this network. Our experiment marks a critical step towards the realization of a global ‘quantum internet’ in the real world.