Our lives will change with quantum internet Quantum mechanics, which emerged in the early 1900s, is used for tools such as extremely pre...
Our lives will change with quantum internet
Quantum mechanics, which emerged in the early 1900s, is used for tools such as extremely precise clocks, quantum computers using quantum bits, and high-end microscopes.
The quantum internet is an extraordinary network of quantum devices that allows some information to be exchanged in a medium that uses the strange laws of quantum mechanics.
This phenomenon, in theory, gives the quantum internet unprecedented capabilities that are impossible to achieve with today's web applications.
It may all sound like a science fiction concept, but building quantum networks is a major ambition for many countries around the world.
The US Department of Defense , which published the first plan of its kind in the field of quantum internet a while ago , stated that they will put the quantum internet dream into action step by step in the next few years.
Based on the strategic statement of the USA , they announced that they have started to work in the European Union ( EU ) and China , which show great interest in the concept of quantum communication .
Although it is currently stated that it will take a long time for it to be put into use, many countries have started to work on the quantum internet considering the possibilities such as becoming a military strategic element in the future and providing a decisive power in defense and war strategies. This work, which seems like a dream, may be completed faster than expected. it reveals.
Most importantly, it does all this thanks to the strange properties unique to quantum states.
This may seem similar to the standard internet. But sending qubits through a quantum channel rather than a classical channel is the biggest difference, an effective system in which particles behave at the smallest scale in so-called "quantum states" that have caused delight and awe among scientists for decades.
This shows that the quantum internet seems determined not to remind us of our favorite web browser in the future.
Quantum (safer) communication
One of the most exciting details discovered by researchers armed with qubits is security.
When it comes to classical communication, most data is secured by distributing a shared key with the sender and receiver and then using that shared key to encrypt the message.
The receiver can then eventually decrypt the data using his own key.
The security of most classical communications today relies on existing algorithms to generate keys that are difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack.
That's why researchers are trying to " quantum " this communication process. This concept is at the heart of the emerging cybersecurity field called quantum key distribution (QKD).
QKD is operated by encoding the cryptography key of one of the two parties with qubits and encrypting a piece of classical data.
The sender then passes these qubits to another person who measures the qubits to obtain key values.
The measurement causes the state of the qubit to collapse; But the important thing is that it is displayed as the value read during the measurement process. The qubit, in a sense, is only there to carry the key value.
More importantly, QKD also means it's easy to find out if a third party is eavesdropping on the qubits during transmission.
Because the intruder can cause the key to crash just by looking at it.
When hackers look at the qubits at any point while messages are being sent, the state of the qubits is automatically changed.
This suggests to us that future transactions may be even more secure.
Why quantum internet?
It is stated that there is still time for QKD technology. Currently, the “usual” way to create QKD is to send qubits unidirectionally via optical fiber cables to the receiver; however, these significantly limit the effectiveness of the protocol.
If such a system were to be built, qubits could easily be lost or dispersed in a fiber-optic cable, meaning quantum signals are very error-prone and will struggle to travel long distances.
In fact, current experiments are limited to ranges of hundreds of kilometers. Of course, there are other solutions to this issue.
When two qubits interact and entangle, they share certain properties that depend on each other.
When the qubits are in an entangled state, any change in one particle in the pair will cause changes in the other, even if they are physically separated.
Therefore, the state of the first qubit can be "read" by looking at the behavior of its entangled counterpart .
In the context of quantum communications, entanglement can actually teleport some information from one qubit to its other half without the need for a physical channel connecting the two during transmission.
Considering the studies and explanations, the cost of these operations will increase considerably with the devices to be sent into space, and as long as these experiments continue via cables, the labor force and the time it takes for dreams to come true will increase considerably.
How does filling work?
The concept of teleportation, by definition, requires that there be no physical network bridging communication devices. However, entanglement needs to be created in the first place and then maintained.
To perform QKD using entanglement, it is necessary to first create the appropriate infrastructure to create entangled qubit pairs and then distribute them between a sender and a receiver.
This creates the " teleportation " channel through which encryption keys can be exchanged .
Specifically, once the entangled qubits are created, you need to send half of the pair to the receiver of the key. An entangled qubit can move along optical fiber networks; but after about 60 miles it can't keep wandering.
Qubits can also be entangled over large distances via satellite, but covering the planet with outer space quantum devices requires quite expensive operations.
Therefore, major engineering challenges remain to create large-scale “teleportation networks” that can effectively connect qubits around the world .
Only after the entanglement network is created can the magic begin, and the connected qubits no longer need to pass through any physical infrastructure to transmit their messages.
In this way, during transmission, the quantum key becomes almost invisible to third parties, impossible to intercept, and reliably "teleported" from one endpoint to another.
Idea; It's making advances that will resonate with industries that deal with sensitive data, such as banking, healthcare or aircraft communications, and governments that handle top-secret information are likely to be among the earliest adopters of the technology.
What else can we do with quantum internet?
Researchers won't need a particularly powerful piece of quantum hardware to connect to the quantum internet.
To do these jobs, even a single qubit processor can do the job. But by connecting quantum devices that currently have limited capabilities, scientists hope they can create a quantum supercomputer that will surpass them all.
Therefore, it is said that by connecting many small quantum devices together, the quantum internet could begin to solve problems that are currently impossible to achieve on a single quantum computer.
This includes accelerating the exchange of large amounts of data and enabling large-scale sensing experiments in astronomy, materials discovery and life sciences.
Therefore, scientists believe that we can reap the benefits of the quantum internet before technology giants such as Google and IBM achieve quantum supremacy.
The most advanced quantum computers from Google and IBM are currently around 50 qubits, far less than what is needed to perform the extraordinary calculations needed to solve the problems quantum research hopes to address.
On the other hand, connecting such devices together via quantum entanglement could create clusters worth thousands of qubits.
For many scientists, creating such computing power is actually the ultimate goal of the quantum internet project.
What can we do with quantum internet?
For the foreseeable future, the quantum internet will not be able to be used to exchange data in the way we currently do on our laptops.
Creating a generalized, mainstream quantum internet will require anticipating decades of technological progress.
Although scientists envision the future of the quantum internet, they predict that it will be impossible to draw parallels between the project's current form and the way we browse the web every day.
The type of information scientists are trying to send over the quantum internet has little to do with opening an inbox and scrolling through emails, he notes, and in fact, replacing the classical internet is not something the developing technology wants to do.
Rather, researchers hope that the quantum internet will sit alongside the classical internet and be used for more specialized applications.
The quantum internet will perform tasks that can be done faster on a quantum computer than on classical computers, or that are very difficult to perform on even the best supercomputers that exist today.
What are we waiting for?
Scientists already know how to create entanglement between qubits and have even successfully used entanglement for QKD.
China, which has been investing in quantum networks for a long time, is breaking records in satellite-borne entanglement. Chinese scientists recently assembled a complex and obtained a record-breaking 745-mile-long QKD.
However, the fact that the next stage is to expand the infrastructure is also evident. All experiments so far have only connected two extremes.
Now that point-to-point communication is available, scientists have begun to accelerate their work to create a network where multiple senders and multiple receivers can exchange on a global scale over the quantum internet.
Essentially, the goal is to find the best ways to generate large numbers of entangled qubits on demand, over long distances and between many different points simultaneously.
This is much easier said than done, of course. For example, maintaining entanglement between a device in China and a device in the United States will likely require an intermediate node in addition to new routing protocols.
That's why countries prefer different technologies to create chaos in the first place. While China has chosen satellite technology, the US DoE has adopted the optical fiber method.
In the US, particles remained entangled in optical fiber for a 32-mile "quantum loop" in the Chicago suburbs, without the need for quantum repeaters. The network will soon be connected to one of DoE's laboratories to establish an 80-mile quantum testbed.
The EU Quantum Internet Alliance was founded in 2018 to develop a strategy for a quantum internet and demonstrated more than 31 miles of circulation last year.
For quantum researchers, the goal is to scale networks to a national level first. The vast majority of scientists agree that this is unlikely to happen before decades.
Quantum internet is undoubtedly a very long-term project and is struggling with many technical obstacles.
But the unexpected consequences that the technology will inevitably bring along the way will contribute to an invaluable scientific journey, complete with many strange quantum applications that cannot even be predicted for now.
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