alt Hacker NewsHi 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!
Replies
How hard do you expect it would be to improve the heralded infidelity from 45% to 10%?
In figure 3 of the paper [1] the heralded infidelity of entanglement is reported to be around 45%. That's not good enough for computation, but it's less than 50% which means it makes purification to arbitrarily low infidelity possible. However, the conversion rates would be pretty brutal for such a high infidelity start (e.g. millions of physical pairs consumed per logical pair good enough for use in a fault tolerant computation e.g. a target logical infidelity of 1e-6 or 1e-9).
It says over fiber. I assume that has to be a straight shot point to point non-routed? Or could this deal with repeaters and routers etc
Layman here! I have no idea what's going on but I have many questions!
- Are the photons themselves carrying quantum information?
- Does the photon link result in entangled particles in Delft and Den Haag?
- Can these entangled particles be used for communication without the optical link?
Also, I tried looking this stuff up and ran into something about quantum "repeaters" and a plans for a whole quantum network. Is this research part of working towards that? How far are we now, and what steps are still missing? Thanks!
Edit: Looks like you guys built a multi-node quantum network 2 years ago! I will have to do some more reading.