United States researchers have sent quantum data 13 miles through open air, with no fiber in between, in a demonstration that adds a wireless leg to one of the most advanced quantum networks in the country. The team beamed fragile quantum states of light between two rooftops on Long Island, from Stony Brook University to Brookhaven National Laboratory, and it matters because it shows the delicate signals a future quantum internet depends on can survive a trip through open, turbulent air rather than only through protected glass fiber.
The link runs between two purpose built stations, the Quantum Watchtower on the roof of Stony Brook’s Health Sciences Center and the Quantum Lighthouse atop the one Brookhaven building with a clear line of sight back to campus. Over that path the researchers sent not only single photons but entangled photon pairs, the harder and more valuable case, leaning on techniques borrowed from astronomy to correct for the air turbulence that would otherwise scramble a beam of light stretched across 13 miles.
What makes the demonstration more than a stunt is where it plugs in, because the new free space hop joins an existing 161 miles of fiber that already links eight sites across Long Island and the New York metropolitan area, the longest quantum network of its kind in the country. In nighttime tests the team generated entangled photons in a Stony Brook physics laboratory, carried them by fiber to the Watchtower, threw them across the open air to the Lighthouse, and caught them at the far end, stitching wireless and wired quantum links into one working system.
The network is already set to grow, since an identical third station has been built at Yale in New Haven, and the team is preparing a far more ambitious 30 mile free space link across the Long Island Sound to connect the New York and Connecticut nodes. A wireless option matters because fiber cannot run everywhere, and being able to shoot quantum signals across open water, or eventually to platforms that move, is the kind of reach a practical quantum network will eventually need.
The milestone drew both federal and state weight, with Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Dario Gil cutting the ribbon and framing the stakes plainly, that the future of quantum information will depend not just on individual machines but “on our ability to connect them.” It rests on serious public money as well, including a 300 million dollar New York State investment behind a new Quantum Research and Innovation Hub at Stony Brook.
The near term uses are the familiar quantum trio, communications kept secure by the laws of physics, computers networked together across distance, and sensors linked into finer instruments, and a wireless layer widens where each of those can reach. The caveats are worth keeping in view, since the entangled transmission ran at night to avoid interference from sunlight and this remains a research demonstration rather than a running service, but the direction is clear enough, a quantum network that no longer has to stay tethered to a single strand of glass.
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