Quantum Network Facility

Quantum networking is capturing the interest of science, industry, and the global internet community. Building a wide-spread entanglement-based global communication network—the Quantum Internet— has the potential to be among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century.

Building these long distance, entanglement-on-demand capabilities will have an enormous impact on the scientific community, particularly by enabling a whole new range of applications, such as enhanced optical interferometry, large line-of-sight arrays of entangled sensors, quantum networks of atomic clocks, and distributed quantum computing.

Despite this promise, quantum networking is only in its nascent phase. Many challenges remain before the full potential of large quantum communication systems can be realized. To meet these challenges, we must:

• Construct regional testbed facilities connecting quantum devices and laboratories
• Characterize and improve the performance of the quantum internet building blocks
• Develop the internet-based control and protocols necessary to operate entanglement-based networks
• Test and characterize the performance of quantum networks, including error analysis and mitigation
• Co-design new information communication stacks that support the distribution of quantum information
• Explore the potential of quantum networks to advance new scientific frontiers via reliable entanglement distribution.

Mission and Vision

The Brookhaven National Laboratory Quantum Network Facility aims to address the challenges that the field is currently facing. As an experimental facility, it is open to the user community. Experimental opportunities, expanding from these research efforts, are focused on the development of foundational quantum devices, including entanglement generation and detection, and characterization of quantum memories with a focus on scalability. Moreover, as one of the key components of our efforts, the facility provides the possibility to integrate these building blocks with existing real-life inter-city fibers and characterize their performance at the network level.

The goal of this facility is to provide infrastructure and capabilities to the user community to benchmark performance, validate concepts, and expedite the development of the quantum ecosystem. Its mission is to advance the already established testbed to perform long distance entanglement experiments for new scientific applications and to develop algorithms and protocols to remotely control a regional quantum internet testbed.