A step closer to a data superhighway for future internet

An international team of researchers led by ANU is helping to build a safe data superhighway for the highly anticipated quantum internet, which promises a new era of artificial intelligence and ultra-secure communication.

Associate Professor Andrey Sukhorukov said the data being shared on this future internet would be stored in light particles, which can store vast amounts of information.

"The light particles move really fast so, for quality-control purposes, we've developed a way to monitor and measure them along quantum circuits, which are like superhighways for the light particles to travel along," said Associate Professor Sukhorukov, who led the research with a team of scientists at the Nonlinear Physics Centre of the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

Kai Wang, a Ph.D. scholar at the Nonlinear Physics Centre who worked on all aspects of the project, said measuring light particles can interfere with the operation of the quantum circuit so the team needed to find a solution to this challenge.

The team designed an innovative system of detectors along the quantum circuits to monitor light particles without losing the information that they are storing, by preserving the quantum state being transmitted.