Quantum Router: First Demonstration
Physicists have long discovered that quantum communication can be super powerful comparing to the classical kind, and has no classical counterpart. They expect quantum information to enable many emerging technologies having a huge impact on the future society. The thing is, so far all those expectations and knowledge is just a theory.
Xiuying Chang and a team of physicists at Tsinghau University (China) announced that they have built and tested the first quantum router to use a quantum control signal to determine the route of a quantum data signal. This new device encodes the information in the polarization of photons, either horizontal or vertical. That’s definitely a step forward though the new router has some limitations. The most significant being that it can handle only one quantum bit or qubit at a time.
Maybe, that’s not a major breakthrough, but rather a novel demonstration that the principle behind powerful quantum computers, nearly perfectly secure quantum cryptography and the quantum internet to distribute these capabilities round the planet, can work.
Via: technologyreview.com
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