Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University Building a Quantum Internet

(NewsWise) A team of computational and computer scientists, networking engineers and technicians, physicists, astronomers, and fire rescue personnel from Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University hope to build the world’s first true quantum internet.
From the rooftop of the decommissioned Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor (BGRR) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Health Sciences Tower at Stony Brook University (SBU)—approximately 13 miles away—is clearly visible. With this clear line of sight, scientists at Brookhaven Lab and SBU hope to establish a quantum channel over which single particles of light (photons) can be sent between the two institutions in open air. Following this proof-of-concept demonstration, they want to scale the network to operate over longer distances through the fiber-optic cables that support much of our telecommunications and data networking today.
“It would be prohibitively expensive to build a new infrastructure just for quantum networking,” explained Dimitrios Katramatos, a technology architect in Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Science Initiative (CSI). “Updating existing connections so that they are quantum enhanced is more feasible from this perspective.”