A rudimentary quantum network link between Dutch cities

Hi all! I'm one of the co-authors. Honestly it's a dream to end up on HN with my research. As mentioned in the video we made, it has been a long road (6-7 years) to achieve this absolute moonshot of a project. I think we'll look back on this demonstration as the first experiment that truly made a distributed and real-world deployed quantum network. Not only did we use a (quantum) hardware platform capable of quantum processing, we also generated the entanglement in a way that it can be used in further quantum computations. In order for all this to work on a distributed network, we had to fully design and build the architecture to support that, both hard- and software. And we did it successfully!

Besides hard-working PhD students, another key ingredient that our research institute QuTech facilitated, was the collaboration with expert hardware and software engineers, allowing us to quickly transform new ideas into (deployable) products. A great show of what's possible when academia mixes with professional engineering. But of course there was enough hacking and tinkering going on that it warrants to be on HN ;)

You can reply here if you have any questions, I'll be checking throughout the day. Thanks!

I've worked in quantum nonlinear optics during my first postdoc 12 years ago, and back then we could only dream of the efficiency of frequency conversions that are used here. So many advances in just a decade, and most of them don't even make the news.

the article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp6442

What is actually the usecase for "quantum internet"?

Like at most i hear about quantum key distribution, but quite frankly the classical equivalents to that are just as good if not better, so what is the actual benefit?

To disperse some of the hype here around using this for "uncrackable" key exchange: QKD has been a product of choice for cybersecurity conmen for decades.

https://www.nsa.gov/Cybersecurity/Quantum-Key-Distribution-Q...

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/whitepaper/quantum-security-technolo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil_(cryptography)

Stick with TLS. If you really think quantum computers are a threat to anything, use a hybrid-PQC key exchange.

My honest professional opinion is a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer will never exist, making classic cryptography superior in every case.

Good job!

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Did you hear a cat just now?