The quantum internet, with its promise of data teleportation and iron-clad security, sounds like something out of Star Trek.
But this is not fiction, and recent developments have computer scientists and programmers from the Netherlands to Indiana excited about the potential of the new technology.
Elements of the quantum internet, concedes Indiana University computer science professor Amr Sabry, are “kind of crazy.” Take teleportation, the movement of data from one location to another with no physical (not even wireless) connection.
“It’s mind-boggling. Data disappears in one place and appears in another,” Sabry says. “It’s unbelievable in some sense. But it has been realized in practice.”
The technology is so new, not even computer and communications experts who are working on it fully understand its potential. Nor, in some cases, do they agree on how to describe the phenomena.
One computer science expert told Tech Talk that data moved – using principals of quantum entanglement – in the teleportation process, from one location to another without actually moving. Said another way, the quantum internet can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it.
“This is a very nascent technology. We’re talking about very different things than the [traditional] internet already gives us,” explains Andrew Weiner, Scifres Family distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. “The understanding of what it will do for us is still being developed.”
Indiana University has a handful of professors researching and working on quantum computing technology, and Purdue researchers have been on the cutting edge in the quantum realm.
Governments, including China, India and the U.S., aren’t waiting to fully understand it to invest in it. The U.S. had been trailing some of its biggest counterparts until 2018, when the National Quantum Initiative Act was passed and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump. Now, the U.S. has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to quantum technology and is leading the charge to develop the quantum internet.
Countries like the U.S. and China are chiefly interested in the quantum internet due to its potential military applications, including its ability to teleport military secrets and other classified materials with much more security than even today’s best encryption technology. Quantum computing also has the potential to solve in seconds computations that would literally take today’s best super computers hundreds (possibly even thousands) of years to solve.
So why the sudden spike in excitement over quantum technology?
In a recent edition of Nature, researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands detailed the new teleportation-based transferring system that works between non-neighboring nodes in a quantum network. This is being considered the first step toward realizing an eventual quantum internet that will enable humans to set up multi-planetary internet networks.
This technology is based off quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement, powers so mysterious, that when Albert Einstein first observed them in nature, he called them “spooky.” So complicated are its principles, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
Still, if you want to get a little deeper with respect to entanglement, the quantum internet and teleportation, a recent New York Times article does a good job explaining it without making it overly technical or complicated.
Here’s the critical part. Mastering quantum computing will allow computer engineers to develop machines that will make today’s computers look like something purchased at Toys R Us. But quantum computing will not reach its potential without a computer network – the quantum internet – that can send quantum information between distant machines. That’s what makes the development reported in May in the Netherlands so exciting.
Purdue engineers previously have addressed an issue regarding the development of quantum networks that are big enough to reliably support more than a handful of users.
Most computer experts agree that it will be several years before quantum computing – and the quantum internet – can give us anything we can’t already achieve through today’s super computers and the classical internet. And some think the quantum internet is not likely to supplant the current internet, but rather exist alongside of it or perhaps even in conjunction with it.
But certainly, quantum technology could profoundly change the way data travels from one place to another. It’s so potentially secure, it means quantum technology could not only solve unsolvable problems with today’s technology, it could do so without knowing what the problem is. Conversely, Google and other data center operators are totally aware of what users are running on its servers. The speed of data movement on the quantum internet would be essentially instantaneous.
And the applications go far beyond military and top-secret government communications.
Researchers believe quantum computing and the quantum internet could one day speed the creation of new medicines, power advances in artificial intelligence, be critical to bank and finance transactions and the trade of various commodities including non-fungible tokens. It also could take on common problems nearly impossible for traditional computers to handle. For instance, quantum computing could formulate the most efficient route for a driver with numerous stops or destinations.
“If it comes to pass at the scale we’re told it could, this is a very big development,” Purdue’s Weiner says. “Quantum (technology) will allow us to crack certain problems we can’t now. It’s going to have a tremendous impact and a lot of people could benefit.”
