"Nobel-Winning Quantum Weirdness Undergirds an Emerging High-Tech Industry, Promising Better Ways of Encrypting Communications and Imaging Your Body"
Unhackable communications devices, high-precision GPS, and high-resolution medical imaging all rely on the non-intuitive quantum phenomenon of entanglement. Two quantum particles, such as atoms or photons, can become entangled in which a property of one particle is linked to a property of the other, and a change to one particle instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. This correlation is a valuable resource in quantum computing. Quantum entanglement is still primarily a research topic in physics, but it is also a component of commercially available technologies, and it is a key player in the emerging quantum information processing industry. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized Alain Aspect of France, John F. Clauser of the US, and Austrian Anton Zeilinger's experimental work with quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is essential in quantum information processing, and photonic entanglement of the type pioneered by the Nobel laureates is vital in quantum information transmission. Large-scale quantum communications networks can be built using quantum entanglement. Jian-Wei Pan, one of Zeilinger's former students, demonstrated entanglement distribution to two locations separated by 764 miles on Earth via satellite transmission, paving the way for long-distance quantum networks. However, direct quantum information transmission rates are limited due to loss, which means that too many photons are absorbed by matter in transit and not enough reach the destination. Entanglement is critical for overcoming this barrier using the nascent technology of quantum repeaters. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), which allows someone to securely distribute encryption keys, is the most well-known quantum communications application. If the keys are properly stored, they will be safe from future powerful, code-breaking quantum computers. This article continues to discuss the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to scientists for their experimental work with quantum entanglement, the concept of quantum entanglement, and QKD.