US DOE Sponsors Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop

The US Department of Energy’s Office of Science sponsored a Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop on Feb 5-6 at the SUNY Global Center in New York City. The event was organized by Brookhaven National Laboratory. The purpose of the meeting, which included 70 representatives from universities and government agencies, was to “begin laying out the groundwork for a nationwide quantum Internet.”
The concept of a quantum Internet holds great promise for engineering and science. The quantum Internet could theoretically transmit qubits between different locations, enabling long-distance communication and distributed computing with quantum systems.
According to the web page for the workshop, the event was an effort to “...explore the specific research and engineering advances needed to build a quantum Internet in the near term. Among its goals, the workshop [will provide] an outline of the essential research needed, detail any engineering and design barriers, and suggest a path forward to move from today's limited local network experiments to a viable, secure quantum Internet.”
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) engineers are currently working with researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory and University of New York at Stony Brook to build the fiber infrastructure necessary for testing long-distance quantum communications.