Abstract For many decades since its inception in the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics seemed to be an exotic and peculiarly non-intuitive kind of physics that applied to matter at the smallest scales: the laws that govern atoms, photons and subatomic particles. All our engineering, meanwhile, was dominated by the familiar rules of classical physics, in which objects have definite positions, trajectories and properties. But, in the past several decades, scientists have started to harness quantum rules in practical technologies. In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman suggested that computers governed by quantum rules might be capable of computations beyond the means of classical ones like those in use today. At much the same time, other researchers showed that information encoded in quantum states could be transmitted between a sender and receiver using a kind of encryption that could not be intercepted and read without that being detected. Quantum computers and quantum cryptography have now become central components of a real-world quantum-information technology that may soon find scientific, industrial and social uses. These applications could be increasingly enabled by a global information network with quantum capability: a quantum internet. China is at the forefront of that enterprise, and one of the scientific leaders in this effort is Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Pan studied for his PhD with quantum-information pioneer Anton Zeilinger in Vienna before returning to China to implement these nascent technologies. In 2012, he won the International Quantum Communication Award and, in 2017, he was included in Nature’s annual list of the ‘ten people who mattered in science’ over the past year. That July, he and his colleagues reported ‘quantum teleportation’ of photons from a ground-based station to a satellite 1400 km away. NSR recently interviewed Professor Pan about the current achievements and future prospects for quantum-information technologies.
Abstract For many decades since its inception in the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics seemed to be an exotic and peculiarly non-intuitive kind of physics that applied to matter at the smallest scales: the laws that govern atoms, photons and subatomic particles. All our engineering, meanwhile, was dominated by the familiar rules of classical physics, in which objects have definite positions, trajectories and properties. But, in the past several decades, scientists have started to harness quantum rules in practical technologies. In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman suggested that computers governed by quantum rules might be capable of computations beyond the means of classical ones like those in use today. At much the same time, other researchers showed that information encoded in quantum states could be transmitted between a sender and receiver using a kind of encryption that could not be intercepted and read without that being detected. Quantum computers and quantum cryptography have now become central components of a real-world quantum-information technology that may soon find scientific, industrial and social uses. These applications could be increasingly enabled by a global information network with quantum capability: a quantum internet. China is at the forefront of that enterprise, and one of the scientific leaders in this effort is Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Pan studied for his PhD with quantum-information pioneer Anton Zeilinger in Vienna before returning to China to implement these nascent technologies. In 2012, he won the International Quantum Communication Award and, in 2017, he was included in Nature’s annual list of the ‘ten people who mattered in science’ over the past year. That July, he and his colleagues reported ‘quantum teleportation’ of photons from a ground-based station to a satellite 1400 km away. NSR recently interviewed Professor Pan about the current achievements and future prospects for quantum-information technologies.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the inception of quantum mechanics catalyzed the first quantum revolution, resulting in groundbreaking technological advances, such as nuclear energy, semiconductors, lasers, nuclear magnetic resonance, superconductivity, and global satellite positioning systems. These innovations have promoted significant progress in material civilization, fundamentally changed the way of life and societal landscape of humanity. Since the 1990s, quantum control technology has made significant strides forward, ushering in a rapid evolution of quantum technologies, notably exemplified by quantum information science. This encompasses domains such as quantum communication, quantum computing, and quantum precision measurement, offering paradigm-shifting solutions for enhancing information transmission security, accelerating computational speed, and elevating measurement precision. These advances hold the potential to provide crucial underpinning for national security and the high-quality development of the national economy. The swift progression of quantum information technology heralds the advent of the second quantum revolution. Following nearly three decades of concerted efforts, China’s quantum information technology field as a whole has achieved a leap. Specifically, China presently assumes a prominent international role in both the research and practical application of quantum communication, leading the global domain in quantum computing, and achieving international preeminence or advanced standing across various facets of quantum precision measurement. Presently, it is imperative to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the developmental priorities in the realm of quantum information in China for the forthcoming 5 to 10 years, in alignment with national strategic priorities and the evolving landscape of international competition. This will enable the proactive establishment of next-generation information technology systems that are secure, efficient, autonomous, and controllable.
The advanced notebooks, mobile phones, and internet applications in today’s world that we use are all entrenched in classical communication bits of zeros and ones. Classical internet has laid its foundation originating from the amalgamation of mathematics and Claude Shannon’s theory of information. However, today’s internet technology is a playground for eavesdroppers. This poses a serious challenge to various applications that rely on classical internet technology, and it has motivated the researchers to switch to new technologies that are fundamentally more secure. By exploring the quantum effects, researchers paved the way into quantum networks that provide security, privacy, and range of capabilities such as quantum computation, communication, and metrology. The realization of Quantum Internet (QI) requires quantum communication between various remote nodes through quantum channels guarded by quantum cryptographic protocols. Such networks rely upon quantum bits (qubits) that can simultaneously take the value of zeros and ones. Due to the extraordinary properties of qubits such as superposition, entanglement, and teleportation, it gives an edge to quantum networks over traditional networks in many ways. At the same time, transmitting qubits over long distances is a formidable task and extensive research is going on satellite-based quantum communication, which will deliver breakthroughs for physically realizing QI in near future. In this paper, QI functionalities, technologies, applications and open challenges have been extensively surveyed to help readers gain a basic understanding of the infrastructure required for the development of the global QI.
The future of the Internet and of computer communication goes through modern physics. Using the new properties of quantum mechanics, various research laboratories around the world are building prototypes of “quantum networks”, a new way that uses some quantum physics principles to deliver information packets. In the near future our data will be able to travel on the Internet at very high speed, also greater than the speed of light, thanks to the quantum network. Independent research groups have already been able to demonstrate the entanglement of photons on fiber optic networks in China and Canada. The result can be considered as the first step for the realization of quantum telematic networks on a metropolitan scale and the connection at large distances of future computers based on quantum physics. But the quantum computer will be such a powerful system that can even damage the security of our systems and networks as we know them today, as well as to personal privacy, already threatened by current network rules.
Internet just turned 50: five decades that shaped the world we live in. Indeed, Internet itself evolved astonishingly since the beginning, from a network prototype consisting of a few static nodes in the early days to a leviathan interconnecting with billions of devices half of the world’s population. Yet the fundamental assumption underlying Internet’s design – i.e., transmitting messages that can be encoded in a sequence of classical bits – remained unchanged during these five decades. But the dawn of the engineering phase of quantum technologies is challenging Internet’s fundamental assumption. Quantum devices demand for communication primitives – namely, the ability to distribute entangled states and to transmit quantum information – governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Hence, principles and phenomena with no counterpart in classical networks require a major network-paradigm shift to harness the quantum mechanics specificities. This presentation aims at shedding light on the challenges and the open problems arising with the design of a protocol stack for the Quantum Internet.
Classical communication is the basis for many of our current and future technologies, such as mobile phones, video conferences, autonomous vehicles and particularly the internet. In contrast, quantum communication is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Due to this fundamental difference, it might offer enormous benefits for security applications, more precise measurements, faster computations, and many other fields of application by interconnecting different quantum devices, such as quantum sensors, quantum computers, or quantum memories. This review provides an overview of the specific properties of quantum information networks. This includes the interfaces between the classical and the quantum regime, the transmission of the quantum information by physical implementations, and potential future applications of quantum networks. We aim to provide a starting point based on fundamental concepts of quantum information processing for further research on a future quantum internet.
Information is physical. Today’s information processing and communication are classical: they are based upon the laws of Newton’s and Maxwell’s classical physics. This assertion holds all the way, from commercial computers and networks, up to their most abstract models, e.g. Turing machines. Research in quantum information was born some twenty five years ago, with the encounter of two major scientific achievements of the 20th century, namely quantum physics and information sciences. A technological motivation for that is an extrapolation of Moore’s law which seems to indicate that the amount of matter needed for one bit will be reduced to one particle sometimes before year 2020. A deeper, scientific driving force of this interdisciplinary research is that of looking for the consequences of having computation and communication based directly upon the laws of quantum physics, i.e. our current ultimate knowledge of the world of elementary particles, as described by quantum mechanics. Breakthroughs in cryptography, communications, information theory and algorithmics have shown that this transplantation from classical to quantum has far reaching consequences, both quantitative and qualitative, and opens new avenues for research within the foundations of computer science and physics. The principles 388 and most striking results and hot topics of this promising way of encoding, processing and communicating information are briefly introduced in this chapter from a mostly computer science point of view, with detailed examples in algorithmics and in cryptography. At the end of the chapter, a short list of some significant articles, textbooks and reports on quantum information are suggested for further reading.