For many years, physicists have imagined a quantum internet: a global system that provides extremely secure communication and powerful new forms of computing, not through electrical signals but through the strange links that can form between particles of light.
Scientists in Edinburgh now report that they have moved this long-standing idea closer to reality.
A team at Heriot-Watt University has introduced a prototype quantum network that joins two previously separate networks into a single, reconfigurable system supporting eight users. This setup can direct entanglement to different users and can also teleport entanglement whenever needed.
Their results, published in Nature Photonics, establish a higher standard for the scale, versatility and performance that future quantum networks may achieve.
Professor Mehul Malik from Heriot-Watt’s School of Engineering and Physical Sciences said: “Other teams had already demonstrated that you can build a single quantum network and send entanglement to many users at once.
“But this is the first time anyone has managed to link two separate networks together. It doesn’t just distribute entanglement in different ways, it actually lets one network talk to the other. This is a major milestone on the road to a real-world quantum internet.”
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