Brookhaven Lab launches new quantum network facility

(HPCWire) The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has launched a new Quantum Network Facility that will serve scientists from across the country and around the world working to advance the exciting new field of quantum communication networks.  IQT-News summarizes and shares the announcement below:
Scientists testing equipment that will be used in the Quantum Free Space Link project, which will transmit entangled photons between a building on the Brookhaven Lab site and another more than 20 kilometers away on the Stony Brook University campus.
The long-term vision for the facility is for it to become one of the first instances of a quantum-repeater-assisted, entanglement distribution network that will be capable of heralding and maintaining entanglement at all of its quantum nodes. The Facility’s fiber network infrastructure is currently being expanded to cover more nodes across Long Island and the New York City metropolitan area. This includes multi-purpose quantum nodes at Brookhaven Lab, Stony Brook University, and in New York City, assisted by entanglement generation and swapping nodes located in Commack and Westbury.
“Building a wide-spread, quantum-based, global communication network—the Quantum Internet—has the potential to be among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century,” said Gabriella Carini, director of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation Division. “This new facility will provide the tools and capabilities researchers need to make large-scale quantum entanglement distribution networks a reality.”
Building these long-distance, entanglement-on-demand capabilities will have an enormous impact on the scientific community. They will enable a whole new range of applications, such as enhanced optical interferometry, large line-of-sight arrays of entangled sensors, quantum networks of atomic clocks, and distributed quantum computing. The facility is equipped with the state-of-the-art quantum networking equipment necessary to build these long-distance entanglement distribution networks.
Quantum networking is only in its infancy. Many challenges remain before the full potential of large quantum communication systems can be realized. Brookhaven’s Quantum Network Facility was formed to address all of these challenges and more. As an experimental facility, it is open to the worldwide user community. Experimental opportunities, expanding from these research efforts, will be focused on the development of foundational quantum devices, including entanglement generation and detection, and characterization of portable quantum memories with a focus on scalability through room-temperature operation.

Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990.  She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.