A team of researchers led by A. Prof Matthew Sellars at The Australian National University have shown that an erbium-doped crystal is a practical building block for a global quantum internet.
Dr Rose Ahlefeldt and A. Prof Matthew Sellars operating a high resolution dye laser (used to study rare earth crystals) in the solid state spectroscopy laboratory at ANU. Image credit: Stuart Hay, ANU
The material is uniquely suited to enable a global quantum telecommunications network, achieving coherence times of more than a second and operating in the same 1550nm band as existing fibre optic networks.
Access the full paper at Nature Physics.
Watch a video about the result.