T-Labs, the research and development division within Deutsche Telekom, has collaborated with quantum networking firm, Qunnect on a demonstration of quantum teleportation over a commercial network.
T-Labs deployed Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware in Berlin in a trial to show how quantum technology can be used to tackle instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure. T-Labs said the trial shows how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks.
The experiment, which was run in January using the Qunnect Carina platform, along with Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, achieved quantum teleportation more than 30km of commercial fibre cables.
In an optical fibre network, optical repeaters are needed every 50km or so to ensure that the photons, which are used to transmit network traffic, are able to travel longer distances. For a quantum internet, it is not possible to amplify and forward quantum information. In an article on phys.org, university of Strasbourg scientific consultant Jutta Witte states that quantum physics allows information to be transferred from one photon to another as long as the information stays unknown. She describes the process as quantum teleportation.
T-Labs and Qunnect said the trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30km fibre loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fibre testbed. The Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons. According to T-Labs and Qunnect, these quantum-entangled photons are distributed over telecom fibre, along with a polarisation compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fibre to support high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes.
T-Labs describes Quantum teleportation as a key building block for the future quantum internet, enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.
Abdu Mudesir, Telekom board member for product and technology, said: “In Berlin, we have now proven that quantum information can be transmitted over 30 kilometres of commercial telecom fibre optics outside of a laboratory. This is done in parallel with regular data traffic and with a very high average accuracy of 90%.”
The trial of quantum teleportation is being positioned as a step towards networking quantum computers over longer distances in the future and pooling computing power in more than one location. “This will create the next generation of secure communication and a building block for Europe’s technological sovereignty,” Mudesir added.
“Teleportation is a novel tool for moving information around networks leveraging quantum physics,” said Mael Flament, CTO at Qunnect. “We are showing the building blocks of teleportation can operate inside a real network, in real racks, under operator control, advancing it from a laboratory experiment to something a telecommunications provider can deploy.”
Qunnect, Deutsche Telekom and other partners plan to extend the experiment to multi-node teleportation configurations, expanding the distance across which they are able to transfer quantum states. Qunnect and Deutsche Telekom said this expansion will evaluate broader deployment and next generation use cases within a metro-scale carrier network infrastructure.
