Engineers at Caltech have achieved a significant milestone in quantum communication by demonstrating a quantum network with two nodes, each containing multiple qubits. The team developed a novel protocol for entanglement multiplexing, enabling parallel quantum information transmission using ytterbium atoms embedded in yttrium orthovanadate (YVO4) crystals. This approach overcomes the bottleneck of sequential qubit preparation and photon transmission, significantly boosting communication rates.
The system leverages the unique optical properties of ytterbium atoms, which emit photons entangled with their quantum states. By fine-tuning lasers to target specific atoms and applying a quantum feed-forward control protocol, the researchers successfully generated entangled states between pairs of atoms despite differences in their optical frequencies. Each node in the network contains approximately 20 qubits, with potential to scale to hundreds per node.
This work lays the groundwork for scalable quantum communication systems, enabling high-performance networks with applications in secure communication and distributed quantum computing. The research, supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation (NSF), was published in Nature.
For more details, visit the original article by Caltech here and the research paper in Nature here.
February 27, 2025
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