Quantum Internet — You heard it Right
Even with CoronaVirus engulfing the world, computer scientists cannot get enough of Quantum Computing. The research is penetrating almost all fields of science. It is also tested lately to bring up another technology called Quantum Internet. The US is already spending a lot to achieve a global Quantum Supremacy. To support 2021 Quantum Research, the Trump administration has raised a request to invest $237 million to fund the same.
The US government was involved with funding experiments that helped send information from computers in one lab to all the other labs in the research facility. This revolution happened back in the 1960s. Soon, the research centers all across the country were using the same facility. This idea gave rise to the present-day internet. The US changed the way people would exchange information.
The Department of Energy is again looking out to achieve the quantum leap in terms of the internet again. The Trump administration requested to slash off all other research funding by 10 percent meanwhile boosting the Quantum Research funding by 20 percent. The Department of Energy requested $25 million to hasten the research in this sphere and work on quantum internet and cybersecurity. These researches do not aim at undermining the current day internet, but having the facilities providing quantum internet will prove to be an advantage over others. Having a quantum network would push researchers to test new drugs and develop better fertilizers by using the quantum network to simulate atomic behavior. Although a lot of countries are pursuing this research, increased funding will ramp up the effort.
A quantum internet will not appear in a single day. It is going to take years to do that because it not only involves evolving the technology but also restructuring the existing network framework and architecture. The quantum equivalent of current-day routers, switches, hard drives, etc., will all have to be adapted, although the groundwork has already begun.
How does Quantum Internet work?
While the traditional internet transmits information using the streaming bits between classical computers. In contrast, quantum computers will make use of the qubits as the basic unit of transfer of the data. These qubits can even be the photons of light.
Bits can only answer simple yes or no. The classical computers would allow some currents to flow while not allowing others to produce a specific output. The qubits, on the other hand, are based on the spooky quantum mechanics theory. A photon’s orientation is not known until it is measured. Its direction can be described with a more complex concept called superposition. Two photons can even be made to behave relative to each other. This behavior is called entanglement. The entangled particles are in a relationship, just like the two faces of a coin. The subtle difference here is that the entangled particles can travel far from each and still be in a relationship.
The catch here is that both superposition and entanglement can only be achieved at temperatures close to absolute zero. While few researchers are working on how to maintain those temperatures and deliver the qubits, few others have been working on how to transmit these using network links. This is going to contribute to the Quantum Internet.
The Department of Energy is already conducting experiments. There lies a 52 miles long optical fiber in Chicago extending from the Argonne National Laboratory. The conducted experiments and created states of light that were entangled. This was done under the roads of Illinois rather than a lab. Similar tests are also being conducted on the East Coast where entangled photons were sent over fiber-optic cable between Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Stony Brook University. This was around 11 miles of distance. This exchange of information is equivalent to a network router, but the next challenge is to use hard drives to store the transmitted data. When we send entangled photons, then we will need hard drives that store these entangled photons in the same form that they are received. FermiLabs will already have quantum hard drives that they innovated, this summer itself.
All this is until the distance till which the light can travel without getting dim. To ensure long-distance transmission, we will need quantum repeaters. The current day classical repeaters take information, copy it, and send the data with a new pulse of light. This is supposedly able to break the entanglement of the particles. Researchers at Argonne have come up with techniques to shuffle the information in such a way that the entanglement is not lost.
Conclusion
What the researchers ultimately imagine is to connect the labs country-wide with this network and exchange information. The goal is not to go to the classical world at all and to build routers, links, and memories which speak the same quantum mechanical language.
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