Qunnect announces Air Force contract for quantum networking over conventional fiber

WASHINGTON — New York City-based startup Qunnect has won an award from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to refine its quantum networking technology, the company announced today.

Awarded in May for an undisclosed amount, the 18-month contract from AFRL is a notable vote of confidence from a US military lab in an idea that no less an authority than the National Security Agency publicly poo-pooed just five years ago: quantum communications.

AFRL has made several other significant moves in this area in the last 12 months, including a $2.1 million award to IonQ to build a local quantum network at its Rome, NY facility and $5.8 million award to Rigetti to work on superconducting quantum networks. But Qunnect argues its approach is unique, with a track record of successful test runs over existing fiber optic cables rather than the “dedicated … special purpose … unique” infrastructure NSA saw as limitations of earlier versions of the technology.

Qunnect’s approach — which it calls “second-generation” quantum networking — “overcomes many of the [flaws] which the NSA had found in the generation-one tech,” CEO Noel Goddard told Breaking Defense ahead of the company’s announcement about the contract. “But the damage was done when the NSA released this [assessment] in 2020.” With the nation’s premier cryptographers advising against investment, she said, “all of the research funding dried up, and we stopped as a country really developing [quantum networking] technologies” — even as China ramped up.

While rapid advances in quantum computers threaten to crack critical encryption systems, quantum communication, while still in its relative infancy, offers the potential to improve security. That’s because quantum particles are so tiny, delicate, and sensitive to outside interference that anyone intercepting them will cause them to “decohere,” which makes the message unreadable — to eavesdropper and intended recipient alike — and makes the attempting eavesdropping obvious to the intended target, Goddard explained.

This is the infamous observer effect: “If somebody looks at it, it changes,” she said. “If someone disturbs it in any way, it changes.”

One practical problem, however, has been that quantum particles are so super-sensitive it’s not just enemy action that induces decoherence, but minor network glitches and natural phenomena. China’s experimental quantum communications satellite, called Mozi, only works on moonless nights, because even moonlight can overpower the quantum signal, according to RAND. Meanwhile, quantum signals sent over fiber optic lines have been hopelessly disrupted by workers using a jackhammer somewhere along the path.

That fragility has forced quantum-communications experiments to use expensive, highly specialized equipment, including elaborate cryogenics to cool everything to far below freezing.

RELATED: Air Force Research lab awards PsiQuantum $10.8M for experimental quantum chips

Qunnect, however, says it has successfully tested quantum networks on commercial fiber in New York, Berlin, and Montana.  The company recently raised $10 million from high-profile investors including Cisco and Airbus Ventures, largely on the strength of the suite of products underpinning these networks, called Carina.

The core of Carina is a hot-pink box of high-tech electronics, able to slot into existing server racks. To send a message, Carina fires tiny lasers at rubidium atoms, forcing them to emit pairs of “entangled” photons with very precisely tuned characteristics. That fine-tuning, in turn, allows one photon of each pair to shoot down a conventional fiber optic cable — alongside which Qunnect also installs a highly sensitive error-correction system that detects the subtle fluctuations that could disrupt the quantum signal and automatically corrects for them. All this technology works at room temperature, without refrigeration.

In the near term, like her AFRL sponsors, Goddard said she sees the quantum tech as a way to secure communications. Not only does the observer effect make it obvious when someone tries to eavesdrop, but the sender and recipient can compare their quantum particles to confirm the match between both halves of each entangled pair. This application is relatively low-hanging fruit because it only requires sending a handful of photons with each message, which authenticate it and act as canaries in the coalmine that warn of attempted interference; the rest of the message can be conventionally encrypted.

So far the tech is limited in scale, but in the longer term, as the technology becomes able to send larger numbers of photons over longer distances, Goddard believes it could become an essential part of future quantum computers. That’s because you need some kind of quantum network to connect multiple quantum processors into a single super-computing cluster: If you connect quantum computers over a conventional network, they can’t share quantum information, which means they can’t work together any differently than conventional computers do, which defeats the point.

Qunnect says it has already tested a repeater that extends the range of its quantum signals through conventional fiber (using a process called entanglement swapping) and plans a real-world demonstration soon, the company said.

“Near-term use cases are security-based,” Goddard said. “[At AFRL], they’re interested in security applications first because it’s the DoD, not surprisingly… . But the longer-term vision [is] to empower other quantum tech.”

At a conference this week, “we spent the morning listening to Microsoft and AWS and others all talking about the scaling problem” involved in linking multiple small quantum processors into one powerful quantum super-computer, Goddard said. “The only way to connect them is with a network that supports quantum information between them.”