Tied game: China, US and Europe hit quantum internet technology milestone at almost the same time
- Researchers create entanglement networks in Hefei, Boston and Delft in separate studies that bring uncrackable encryption closer to reality
- China’s leading physicist in the field Pan Jianwei said the achievement was ‘a pivotal milestone’ and is ready for experiments on a larger scale
Research teams in China, the US and the Netherlands have independently reached nearly simultaneous breakthroughs that could bring nearly unhackable quantum-based internet services closer to reality.
The peer-reviewed journal Nature, which published two of the studies on Wednesday, said the experiments – using three actual cities – were the most advanced demonstrations of quantum internet technology yet.
Each team used optical fibres tens of kilometres long to establish a network within an urban environment, based on the quantum phenomenon of entanglement that allows a pair of separated photons to remain intimately linked across time and space.
The ability to harness entanglement is seen as a vital step towards a quantum internet, promising a way to generate random cryptographic keys for encoded information so rapidly they become almost uncrackable. It could also be used to connect quantum computers, expanding their operational capabilities.
The feats of the Chinese and US teams were detailed in Nature, while the Dutch researchers’ paper was uploaded as a preprint on repository website arXiv in April and has not undergone peer review.
