Not only can quantum physics speed up
computing, but it could also redefine how
computers communicate and ensure that no
one could ever hack them. That’s partly why the
pace of quantum innovations has achieved a
new urgency. But many experts can’t see the
finish line, let alone know when we’ll get there.
T
he massive intersection of James Avenue and East Boughton Road in
Bolingbrook, Illinois, looks like many other crossroads in suburban
America. A drive-through Starbucks keeps watch over 15 lanes of
turning and merging mid-size SUVs, most headed for the sprawling parking
lots of the Promenade shopping mall to the south, a few others en route to the
shooting gallery and gun shop across Interstate 355 to the east.
Few of the people in the SUVs realize they’re driving over part of America’s
blossoming research into quantum information technology. Beneath the
interstate, entangled photons—quantum particles moving at the speed of light—
are teleporting to and from the Argonne National Laboratory in the next town
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land-based quantum networks in the nation.
Researchers hope to use the 52-mile quantum test site in Bolingbrook and
others like it to prove that you can trap information inside a quantum state of
matter (like a photon) in one location, send it somewhere else, and access it
completely intact on the other end. They need to factor in the challenges of
frozen ground, the sun’s radiation, and vibrations from all those vehicles
traveling overhead, but if they can prove it, they’ll have invented a way of
communicating that makes 5G seem quaint. Researchers at other laboratories
are simultaneously trying to feed algorithms into similar elementary states of
matter, known as quantum bits, and have them come out transformed correctly
at the end of the computation. If that’s successful, they’ll have an entirely new
type of computer on their hands.
