China developing quantum internet providing secure communications

Guardian:
Scientists have taken a major step towards building a global quantum internet by beaming “entangled” particles of light from a satellite to ground stations more than 700 miles apart.

The feat paves the way for a new kind of internet which draws on the curious ability for subatomic particles to be connected to one another despite being far apart and even on opposite sides of the planet.

Researchers believe that by linking particles together in this way, encrypted information could be sent from place to place across a quantum network with no danger of it being decrypted and read by others, as can be done on the existing internet.
...
The work obliterates the previous world record for sending pairs of photons that are connected to one another by a strange rule of quantum physics first spotted by Einstein. Until now, the farthest researchers had ever sent entangled photons stood at a mere 65 miles, less than one tenth of the distance achieved in the satellite experiment.

“It’s a first step, and a major step, toward creating a global quantum network,” said Pan. “All the previous methods are limited to about 100km so can only work within a city.”

The experiment relied on the world’s first quantum-enabled spacecraft: a Chinese satellite called Micius. As it soared over China, the satellite created pairs of photons with properties that were linked through quantum entanglement. It then beamed these simultaneously to ground stations in Delingha, Lijiang and Nanshan. Each pair of particles travelled up to 1,240 miles before they reached their destinations. Details of the study are published in Science.
...
There is more.

They discovery could create a real challenge for Chinese hackers in the future.  In the meantime, it will also be a challenge for the NSA to keep up with global communications.

This is what China has been doing while Obama imposed severe restrictions on US defense spending.  The Chinese have also developed:
... a first prototype of microwave photonics-based radar, which analysts said could revolutionize the detection and imaging of targets for a wider range of military and civilian applications.

The new radar is said to have the features of fast-imaging, high resolution and clear identification of targets, having the highest resolution among all the micro-photonic radars currently known, and is even 30 times higher than similar radars worldwide, the Institute of Electronics at Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said in a statement on its website early this week.
...
This could provide them wit a tactical advantage in future conflicts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains