An international team headed by physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has, for the first time ever, experimentally implemented secure quantum communication in the microwave band in a local quantum network, using a 35-centimeter superconducting cable. The new architecture represents a crucial step on the road to distributed quantum computing.
Using special cooling devices, the physicists ultimately succeeded in demonstrating the principle of entanglement in the microwave range, an important prerequisite for reliable quantum communication. The researchers use a so-called squeezed microwave state as the quantum state. This is a special manifestation of an electromagnetic wave that can only be explained with quantum mechanics. (TUM)