Quantum Teleportation and a perfectly secure Internet

[John Clark]

There is a way to transfer a set of a photon's properties at the speed of light, and you can use that fact to encode information. If you do that you can make a communication line that even a Quantum Computer couldn't tap, in fact it would be as secure as the laws of physics.  This has actually been demonstrated many times under laboratory conditions, but only when the fiber optic lines contain no other signals because it was thought if conventional Internet traffic was also sent over those same fiber optic lines it would destroy the delicate quantum entanglement, so the only way to have a Quantum Internet would be the start from scratch and build an entirely new network which is impractical. But that turned out NOT to be true.

In the December 20, 2024 issue of the journal Optica researchers report that they set up a 30km long (18.6 mile) fibre optic cable and sent BOTH classical Internet traffic information and quantum teleportation information through it.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili, who was not involved in the research, said:

“Quantum teleportation has been demonstrated before, but only under very careful laboratory conditions. The problem is that quantum-entangled particles used to teleport information quickly become entangled with everything else along their path. The entirety of telecommunications technology (and indeed the internet) relies on transmitting light (photons) through optical fibres. This work is the first demonstration of quantum teleportation of entangled photons through busy optical fibres carrying conventional telecommunications traffic. Many people have long assumed that nobody would build specialised infrastructure to send particles of light. If we choose the wavelengths properly, we won’t have to build new infrastructure. Classical communications and quantum communications can coexist."

“Being able to make use of quantum teleportation in our existing infrastructure of optical fibre networks is a huge breakthrough in achieving quantum networks. It will have many applications, from quantum cryptography and quantum sensing to quantum computing, and potentially even a new quantum Internet.”

Quantum teleportation coexisting with classical communications in optical fiber

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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