Towards a Blueprint for a Quantum Internet

Peter H. Gwynne

US government, academic and industrial scientists have laid out a blueprint for building a nation-wide quantum internet.

Dan Fox, Davide Castelvecchi

Nicholas A. Peters

A Quantum Path Forward. Today, many scientific experts recognize that building and scaling quantum-protected and enhanced communication networks are among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century. The international research community perceives the construction of a first prototype global quantum network-the Quantum Internet-to be within reach over the next decade. In February 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research hosted the Quantum Internet Blueprint workshop to define a potential roadmap toward building the first nationwide quantum Internet. The workshop participants included representatives from DOE national laboratories, universities, industry, and other U.S. agencies with serious interests in quantum networking. The goal was to provide an outline of the essential research needed, detail any engineering and design barriers, and suggest a path forward to move from today's limited local network experiments to a viable, secure quantum Internet.

Fabio Cavaliere, Rana Pratap Sircar, Tommaso Catuogno

Stephen Battersby

Ahmed Banafa

Building a quantum internet is a key ambition for many countries around the world as such a breakthrough will give them competitive advantage in a promising disruptive technology, and opens a new world of innovations and unlimited possibilities. Recently the US Department of Energy published the first blueprint of its kind, laying out a step-by-step strategy to make the quantum internet dream come true. A quantum internet would be able to transmit large volumes of data across immense distances at a rate that exceeds the speed of light. Academics, researchers, and IT professionals will need to create devices for the infrastructure of quantum internet including: quantum routers, repeaters, gateways, hubs, and other quantum tools. A whole new industry will be born based on the idea of a quantum internet existing in parallel with the current ecosystem of companies the authors have in a regular internet.