Three teams – in Boston, in China, and the Netherlands – have simultaneously announced that they’ve figured out ways to store entangled photons without breaking the entanglement, a critical step in building quantum repeaters, and, thus, scalable quantum networks.
The Boston team used silicon atoms embedded in diamond chips. A team in the Netherlands also used diamond crystals, but with nitrogen atoms instead of silicon. And the Chinese team used clouds of rubidium atoms. The American and Chinese teams both published their papers in this month’s Nature magazine, while the Netherlands research is available as a pre-print.
This is a big deal for two reasons. First, because it brings us closer to actually having secure quantum networks. And, second, because China is finally getting some competition in the quantum networking space, where it’s long held a substantial lead.
