The QUANTUMINTERNET isonitsway

You may not have realised it as you were doom-scrolling through news about pandemics and politics, but 2020 was the year of the quantum internet – all thanks to a pair of experiments that suggests this futuristic networking technology could indeed be possible.

It’s not a new idea, with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) setting up the first quantum key distribution network in 2003 and experiments in quantum teleportation going back to 1997 at the University of Vienna.

So what was so special about 2020? In February, scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China published a paper detailing a 1,200km quantum link with the Micius satellite, the longest yet. A few months later, in September, researchers at the University of Bristol revealed a way to scale this nascent tech beyond a single connection.

“When I started, getting quantum computing to work between two people was a big deal,” said Siddarth Joshi, a research fellow at the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering. “Now we are getting it to work between larger and larger networks. And satellites, when I started, were a dream. Now there’s a satellite in orbit and we’re building other satellites.”

Plenty of other researchers are investigating this area, with notable work at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Chicago, and a Delft University of Technology