Very cool, I wonder if a quantum link like this needs a clear line of sight. What would be the limits of quantum communication like this? It would be amazing to be able to achieve real time communication between planetary bodies for example.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
This is not a "quantum entangled data link", it is a regular radio data link secured using quantum computing to generate encryption keys.
But why
Because you can use one time pad encryption which is theoretically unbreakable. Intercepting the photons used to generate these keys would instantly alter their state thus making them unusable.
oh right one time pad.
It really does feel like you could do this in a better way, though.
I've read some weird paper about such an analog channel, where something quantum on both sides was used to create another analog signal used kinda as an encryption key. Stumbled upon it trying to understand some things about optics long ago.
Quantum entanglement/teleportation does not mean information transmission exceeds the speed of light. You're still limited to sending entangled particles to your destination following the laws of physics. You cannot transmit information via this phenomenon.
What you can use this for is transmission integrity. Where you will know if an outside observer intercepted your transmission then sent it on its way to the destination. This is more commonly known as a man in the middle attack (MitM).
Adversary in the middle is the updated terminology. Not just because sex, but also bots and AI.
Ooo thank you, I'm definitely out of date by now
I always imagined quantum entangled particles would be useful in information transmission. Probably not directly, such as the particles transmiting the information themselves, but in a way potentially vibrating a particle on one end and getting the same vibrations on the other end. Depending on the vibrations you deduced the information.
Obviously sending one of the entangled particles to another destination would be as slow as the fastest mode of transport.
But i wonder if we had a entangled communication device on either of the voyages probes if we would be able to send commands to them from earth with no lag in transmission.
Quantum entangled particles can't influence each other; they just allow you to infer information about one particle by observing the other. It's like if you randomly put a red and a blue ball in two different boxes without looking, then moved them far apart. Opening one box and seeing a red ball instantly tells you the other box has a blue ball, no matter the distance, but no information has been transmitted faster than the speed of light (because the boxes can only move slower than light).