Building the Quantum Internet requires devices to support a new type of communication protocol, entanglement distribution. This process requires novel hardware to host and transact quantum information. Qunnect is developing the hardware to perform these transactions and to interface these devices with telecom fiber infrastructure.
How it Works

1. Entangled pairs of photons are generated at entanglement sources and then transmitted along separate fibers. The information contained in these photon-pairs is connected to one another, regardless of the distance between each other.

2. Quantum transactions require exquisite timing, so it is critical to synchronize the photons traveling along fibers of different lengths. We use quantum memories to perform this operation. However, they are not efficient at telecom frequencies, so the telecom photons first need to be processed by a frequency converter, then sent onto the quantum memory buffers for storage.

3. When all four memories are populated with their respective photons, we are ready to perform a transaction called entanglement swapping. Here’s where the magic happens!

4. Photons are released from the center two memory buffers and interact at an interference measurement station. This causes the photons in the outer two memory buffers to be entangled, thus swapping entanglement from their previous pair to now being entangled with another.

Entanglement has now been distributed over long-distance. This process can be repeated between different sets of nodes to perform transactions between any set of nodes separated by any distance in the future Quantum Internet.