Cisco’s Quantum Summit brought together quantum computing experts last week from around academia, government, and industry and highlighted the progress we’ve seen over the past few months.
“Significant progress has been made, particularly in the realm of distributed quantum computing,” says Inder Monga, executive director at the Energy Sciences Network and one of the speakers at last week’s event.
Quantum networking has the potential to link quantum chips, computers, and enterprise data centers together to allow quantum computing to scale.
“While much of the work is still in the research phase, I anticipate significant growth in announcements regarding the use of quantum networking to create networks of quantum computers,” Monga tells Network World.
For example, the QUANT-NET research project is working on a prototype distributed quantum network spanning 5 kilometers of fiber between Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley.
“We plan to demonstrate significant progress towards this goal in the upcoming months,” says Monga, who is also the lead principal investigator at QUANT-NET.
There’s a tremendous amount of growth in the field of quantum communications, he says, and it reminds him of the early days of the Internet.
But that’s not where quantum networking is already seeing actual enterprise use.
Spreading quantum key distribution
“The most established use case of quantum networking to date is quantum key distribution — QKD — a technology first commercialized around 2003,” says Monga. “Since then, substantial advancements have been achieved globally in the development and production deployment of QKD, which leverages secure quantum channels to exchange encryption keys, ensuring data transfer security over conventional networks.”
Quantum key distribution networks are already up and running, and are being used by companies, he says, in the U.S., in Europe, and in China.
“Many commercial companies and startups now offer QKD products, providing secure quantum channels for the exchange of encryption keys, which ensures the safe transfer of data over traditional networks,” he says.
Companies offering QKD include Toshiba, ID Quantique, LuxQuanta, HEQA Security, Think Quantum, and others.
One enterprise already using a quantum network to secure communications is JPMorgan Chase, which is connecting two data centers with a high-speed quantum network over fiber. It also has a third quantum node set up to test next-generation quantum technologies.
Meanwhile, the need for secure quantum networks is higher than ever, as quantum computers get closer to prime time.
Quantum computing has the potential to break current encryption standards, and, in fact, in October, Chinese researchers announced that they used a quantum computing method to successfully attack key encryption components.
Quantum key distribution is one of the two main technologies that can address this problem today, the other being quantum-safe encryption.
That’s why network operators will spend more than $6 billion, cumulatively, over the next five years on developing and implementing quantum key distribution networks, Juniper Research’s Michelle Joynson predicted in a report last week.
Building large-scale quantum networks
Beyond QKD, the next evolution is large-scale quantum networks connecting multiple companies and organizations. With quantum networks, the entire communication is secured, not just the encryption key.
And there are several regional test networks up and running in various cities in the U.S.
One of the speakers at last week’s conference was David Awschalom, director at the Chicago Quantum Exchange, which runs an eight-node, 400-kilometer quantum network in the Chicago area.
Chicago is a good place to stress test quantum networks, he told conference attendees, because of the large temperature swings the city sees over the course of a day.
Dozens of corporate partners and nonprofits are working with the organization, he says, including JP Morgan.
“It’s been interesting to us to watch the growth of interest from the financial firms, which clearly are early embracers of communication technologies and are hiring some of the leading theorists in the world,” he says.
JP Morgan Chase VP Omar Amer was also one of the speakers, and talked about the benefits of QKD in particular.
“QKD can be deployed prior to fully-fledged quantum networks,” Amer told the conference. “The technology is commercially available today and deployable over existing optical networks. And, in addition to post-quantum encryption, it can be used to address the quantum computing decryption threat.”
QKD also has another potential benefit — authentication. It can be used to prove that someone is actually in a particular physical location.
“This is classically an impossible task,” he says.
Closing the gap with China
There’s still a long way to go before the US catches up with China, however.
According to a December report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies, China’s quantum communication network is the largest in the world, with a length of 12,000 kilometers, linking together Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities.
Plus, the country has two quantum communication satellites. The first satellite was launched in 2016, and a second satellite went up into low Earth orbit in 2022. A third satellite is planned for 2026.
One reason for why the U.S. is lagging behind, according to the Mercator Institute report, is that innovation in the U.S. is driven by private capital, which is focused on quantum computing instead of quantum networking. Building large-scale quantum communication networks is an infrastructure project and requires government and military support.
According to a Capgemini report released last week, China leads the world in quantum communication, with $15 billion in government funding — far ahead of the U.S. and other countries.
Elsewhere in Asia, Korea is working on a 2,000-kilometer quantum key distribution backbone which will offer quantum-safe communications as a service.
“Currently, the U.S. government is not investing in such testbeds or demonstrations, ensuring it will be a follower and not a leader in the development of technical advances in the field,” said a report released last year by the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, a global association of more than 250 government agencies, academic institutions, and businesses.
There is hope, however. For example, in September, Boeing announced that it is working on a quantum satellite, scheduled for launch in 2026. However, this satellite will only test entanglement swapping technology. That is a key step towards actual quantum communication, but it’s just a step. Actual quantum communication is still out of reach.
In fact, a quantum networking experiment was launched into space late last year, said Makan Mohageg, an applied quantum physicist at the company. The NASA JPL experiment, about the size of two cereal boxes, is the Space Entanglement and Annealing QUantum Experiment — SEAQUE — and arrived at the International Space Station in November. It was designed to test quantum transmitters and receivers in the stressful environment of outer space, and also to test new “self-healing” technology to allow lasers to recover from radiation damage.
“Good news,” Mohageg told conference attendees. “The entanglement source works, exactly the same as it worked on Earth.”
In addition, there were a number of coronal mass ejections, he added, “where the sun out of fury and anger shoots radiation at us. Many of these pulses have exceeded the various safety thresholds that are set by NASA.” And the radiation damage is starting to accumulate, he says. “We’re nearing the point where we will run the annealing laser to try to repair and recover that.”
But while waiting for quantum networks to be built, and satellites to go up to space, enterprises can already start moving ahead.
Energy Sciences Network’s Monga suggests that enterprises in fields like financial services that have the most pressing needs for secure networking start getting familiar with the challenges of deploying QKD gear and educating staff about the complexities — and benefits — of quantum networks.
“There are limitations with existing equipment that companies are working hard to mitigate, and hands-on familiarity with the equipment is important before one puts production quantum systems on a company’s roadmap,” he says.
Source:: Network World