Scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have taken an important step towards a quantum Internet by connecting three qubits (nodes) in two different labs into a quantum network. Such quantum networks could be used for secure communication, for safer means of identification or even distributed quantum computing.
The group, led by Ronald Hanson, is no stranger to setting up quantum links. In 2015 members of the group performed the first loophole-free Bell inequality violation, successfully entangling two electron spin states over 1.3 kilometres in an experiment that finally put the lid on the 80-year-old Einstein-Podolski-Rosen dispute about the nature of entanglement. Although this two-node experiment could hardly be called a network, it laid the basis for the present work, which is described in a preprint on the arXiv repository.
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