The new demonstration sets a milestone for quantum networks by achieving a level of flexibility and scalability not previously shown. Professor Mehul Malik of the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences explained, "Other teams had already demonstrated that you can build a single quantum network and send entanglement to many users at once. But this is the first time anyone has managed to link two separate networks together. It doesn't just distribute entanglement in different ways, it actually lets one network talk to the other. This is a major milestone on the road to a real-world quantum internet."
The prototype system relies on readily available optical fiber costing less than one hundred pounds. Researchers took advantage of the complex, chaotic propagation of light inside this fiber to develop a reconfigurable entanglement router. Dr Natalia Herrera Valencia, the study's lead author, said, "Light tends to ricochet chaotically through the fibres' hundreds of internal pathways. We turned that chaos into a resource."
Through this approach, the device can programmatically distribute quantum entanglement between users using multiple patterns. It supports rapid switching between local links, global connections, and hybrid configurations. A key technical advance is the ability to multiplex the channel-offering services to multiple users simultaneously, as is done in conventional telecommunications.
The team achieved multiplexed entanglement teleportation, swapping entanglement between four users on two channels at once. Previous experiments have teleported entanglement, but not to this number of users or with this level of flexibility. Dr Herrera Valencia said, "By shaping the light at the input, we effectively programmed the fibre, transforming its messy internal scattering into a powerful, high-dimensional optical circuit. That lets us route quantum entanglement wherever we want, even teleport it, using this deceptively simple piece of fibre."
Professor Malik emphasized the potential impact for quantum computing. "Quantum computing could be world-changing, transforming how we find and develop medicines, create new materials for batteries and supercharge machine learning. A promising current approach to building a large-scale, powerful quantum computer is to interconnect lots of smaller quantum processors. Our prototype is a network that can flexibly distribute and swap entanglement among many users, or quantum processors-it could be the breakthrough quantum computing has been waiting for. Yes, this is a lab-scale demonstration, but the principle is extendable."
The research is part of the UK's Integrated Quantum Networks Hub, supported by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the European Research Council, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. The work involved researchers from Heriot-Watt University's Beyond Binary Quantum Information Lab and the Edinburgh Mostly Quantum Lab.
Research Report:A large-scale reconfigurable multiplexed quantum photonic network
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Heriot-Watt University
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