Quantum 'spooky action at a distance' becoming practical?

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-quantum-spooky-action-distance.html

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

94 41 9 years ago

phys.org

QAPereo3• 9 years ago

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/e1701230.full

Original paper, in case you don’t want to slog through Phys.org’s brand of press release nonsense.

Roritharr• 9 years ago

"This was possible to achieve thanks to state of art photon source and detection technology"

What's a photon source thats not a lamp/laser?

alphydan• 9 years ago

I have not read the full article, but usually you need a laser which can produce single photons and which can control their polarisation (Other sources produce quantum superpositions of having 1 photon, 2 photons, 4 photons, etc. It's a probability distribution containing all those numbers).

deepnotderp• 9 years ago

You usually need single photon sources or SPDC.

comstock2• 9 years ago

Don’t you need SPDC to get entangled photons anyway?

TipVFL2• 9 years ago

Quantum entanglement is such a neat phenomenon, but secure communication feels like such a boring application. How much extra security would a quantumly protected communication channel provide over just using some really heavy encryption sent in a normal manner?

alex_anglin• 9 years ago

That observation of the communication would break the link, versus capture and (attempt to) decrypt?

Klathmon2• 9 years ago

That to me seems like the coolest possibility.

Encryption that breaks if someone other than the authorized parties observes it. Something which isn't possible with "traditional" encryption.

TipVFL2• 9 years ago

That seems very exploitable, an enemy could theoretically intercept all your communications, just to prevent you from communicating.

Asooka• 9 years ago

A channel that disappears the moment you look at it seems like it would be very vulnerable to DoS.

amelius• 9 years ago

What is the practical application of this then, considering that you can choose an arbitrarily large key to make eavesdropping or tampering practically impossible?

I don't get what's so exciting about this.

Or does this only become practically useful once quantum computing breaks traditional encryption?

tonmoy• 9 years ago

You would know that a third party is not even storing your encrypted data for a future time when that encryption method/implementation may become obsolete.

nixpulvis• 9 years ago

Seems to me you avoid the problem of large bad actors collecting a lot of encrypted data with the goals of decyrypting one day with better hardware.

That said, who knows what kinda fun could be had with the side channels of our own physics system.

cookingrobot• 9 years ago

One-time pads seem like a much easier solution, and they're never breakable given any amount of computation. They require upfront preparation to trade the pad, but seem a lot easier than quantum anything.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

Current production quantum key distribution systems are actually succeptable to attack by gaming the systems that detect the particles and going beyond their limitations .

binarytransform• 9 years ago

Source?

xbmcuser• 9 years ago

Sadly even if we achieve quantum communication it will be only be for military and governments as we have already seen how government and law enfrocement all over the world has been against secure communication between people.

QAPereo3• 9 years ago

I’m as dystopian and paranoid as the next guy, but come on... we’re using the results of ARPANET night now. Our devices have GPS. We can use whatever encryption we like (for now). The governments of most of the world monopolizing a means of communication for long, is unlikely.

Quantum 'spooky action at a distance' becoming practical?

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