ACM TechNews

Welcome to the Quantum Internet

Science News (08/16/08) Vol. 174, No. 4, P. 24; Castelvecchi, Davide

A quantum Internet could potentially harness the properties of quantum physics to transfer software and data between future quantum computers, which could outperform ordinary computers by running multiple operations simultaneously, in superposition. Harvard University's Mikhail Lukin is confident that a lab demo of a quantum network will be furnished within a few years. An important step is the creation of a secure common encryption key by tapping the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which prevents interference since the act of eavesdropping changes the states of the entangled particles. Quantum communication becomes more challenging as the distance between points on a network increases, making the establishment of an encryption key exponentially slower. Lukin and colleagues have worked out a scheme for long-distance, quantum-encrypted communication by producing entangled pairs of photons that are far apart. Long-distance entanglement at a reasonable speed could be enabled through a method for storing pairs of photons that have been successfully entangled while other pairs are still being created, and Lukin, fellow Harvard researcher Lene Hau, and others generated the first rudimentary quantum memory in 2001. The most recent quantum memory development involved the capture of two entangled photon states in an atom cloud and the on-demand release of those states. Lukin says a practical quantum memory will eventually need to store data on some kind of solid support.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/34762/
title/Welcome_to_the_Quantum_Internet

---

© Copyright 2008 Information, Inc. This service may be reproduced for internal distribution.