The future internet could be built of diamonds

With quantum computing looking so promising, scientists have been studying how to store and transmit quantum-scale data. There looks to be a limit to how far quantum data can maintain its integrity when passed through fiber optic cabling — about 100 kilometers — and so scientists plan a sparkling new internet of diamond repeaters, each of which captures and passes along quantum data to the next network node. They’ve known for a while that artificial diamonds manufactured a certain way can hold that quantum data. However, storing and transmitting it seems to require different diamond structures, making the sparklers’ use for this purpose problematic. Until now, that is, with the announcement in the July 6 issue of Science of a new designer diamond engineered by a team from Princeton.