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Quantum entanglement over 30 miles of fiber has brought super secure internet closer

In a paper in Nature today, Pan Jian-Wei at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, and his colleagues describe an experiment in which they demonstrate entanglement through more than 30 miles of fiber coiled in a lab, with lower transmission errors than previous attempts. “This is a big improvement,” says Pan, who is sometimes called the “father of quantum.”

The trick was to find efficient ways to entangle two particles. The team used an atom, which stayed put, and a photon, which was sent down the fiber. They found that they were able to create an entangled pair of nodes much more reliably than was demonstrated in previous experiments—including the one setting the mile benchmark, which it beat by five orders of magnitude. 

How big a deal is this result? “It’s nice, but not nearly as big as it sounds,” says Stephanie Wehner, a researcher at QuTech, a quantum computing and quantum internet research centre in Delft in the Netherlands. Pan’s team used 30 miles of coiled fiber, which still demands an impressive degree of control over the whole system, but demonstrating entanglement between two nodes in one location is much easier than when they are actually 30 miles apart. 

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615191/quantum-entanglement-over-30-miles-of-fiber-has-brought-super-secure-internet-closer/?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement