Quantum computers are making all the headlines these days, but quantum communication technology may actually be closer to practical implementation. In a bid to hasten its arrival, researchers have now mapped out the path to a quantum internet.
The building blocks for these emerging technologies are more or less the same. They both use qubits to encode information—the quantum equivalent to computer bits that can simultaneously be both 1 and 0 thanks to the phenomena of superposition. And they both rely on entanglement to inextricably link the quantum states of these qubits so that acting on one affects the other.
But while building quantum computers capable of outperforming conventional ones on useful problems will require very large networks of qubits, you only need a handful to build useful communication networks.
And we’re already well on the way. In a review article in Science, researchers from the University of Delft in the Netherlands outlined six phases of development towards a global network of quantum-connected quantum computers and point out that we’re already on the bottom rung of that ladder.
“We are now at an exciting moment in time, akin to the eve of the classical internet,” the researchers wrote. “Recent technological progress now suggests that we may see the first small-scale implementations of quantum networks within the next five years.”
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