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Quantum Internet Could Cross Seas By Container Ship


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A container ship.

Researchers at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo suggest container ships could be used to create a kind of international quantum Internet.

Credit: ShippingTribune.com

Container ships could be used to create a kind of international quantum Internet, according to Simon Devitt from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and colleagues.

No one knows how to build the devices proposed to send quantum data over long distances, called quantum repeaters, and the technology needed to store quantum bits also does not exist. The team examined the research of groups working on quantum hard drives and calculated that for diamond-based drives, a single shipping container could hold the equivalent of 125 bytes of quantum data, while for silicon-based drives the same space would hold nearly 200 terabytes. Most of the container space would be used for cooling and power to keep the drives functioning.

Considering large ships can carry 10,000 containers, a fully loaded vessel on a 20-day voyage between Japan and the United States would have a transfer rate equivalent to between 10 bytes per second and 1 terabyte per second, depending on the memory used.

From New Scientist
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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