tech 🔬 Quantum entanglement over 62km aerial fiber
Researchers from NIST, UMD, and Qunnect successfully demonstrated long-distance polarization-entangled photon distribution using a partially aerial fiber-optic link. The test connected NIST’s Gaithersburg campus to UMD in College Park, Maryland, across 62 kilometers of commercial telecom fiber. Over a 24-hour stress test, they maintained an entanglement distribution rate of about 1,500 pairs per second. The setup used automated polarization compensation to counteract environmental noise like wind and temperature swings. This proves metropolitan quantum networks can run on existing, unshielded commercial infrastructure. 🤯