The United States Releases Blueprint for Quantum Internet
The US Department of Energy released the Quantum Internet blueprint at a press conference held at the University of Chicago last Thursday. If all goes well, the quantum internet will be built within 10 years.
The United States hopes to develop a quantum Internet to achieve safer communications and advance scientific research in fields such as gravity wave detection. The published 38-page paper outlines its key goals and the research challenges that need to be solved before realizing the concept. The main research goals include building quantum Internet equipment, developing routing technology, and finding correcting the spread of qubits across quantum networks when the data error occurs.
The quantum Internet proposed by DOE is a network that transmits data in the form of qubits instead of traditional bits. The quantum properties of subatomic particles not only help to build complex non-classical computers but also theoretically help to create a new type of network. Paul Dabbar, DOE’s Deputy Minister of Science, said: “One day, the Quantum Internet will be transformed into a complete second Internet, the Internet parallel to the digital Internet.” A major advantage of quantum networks is their security, which is generally considered “unbreakable.”
According to the announcement, the U.S. Department of Energy will work with universities and industry researchers to plan to build a functional quantum internet within ten years. At present, researchers at the University of Chicago and a laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy have established a 52-mile prototype quantum Internet, which recently successfully completed the first experiment.
High hopes are placed on the development plan. Early users of quantum Internet may include financial and healthcare industries, as well as national security applications and aviation communications. In the future, quantum Internet may be used to power ultra-precise quantum sensor clusters to detect gravitational waves.
