Big scientific breakthrough at sub-atomic level promises secure comms

Chinese scientists have pulled off a major feat with one of the sub-atomic world’s weirdest phenomena: photons that behave like twins and experience the same things simultaneously, even over great distances. The space-based technique developed by the researchers and reported Thursday in the journal Science holds potential for revolutionizing telecommunications and perhaps someday developing a hackproof internet.

The principle is called quantum entanglement, in which photons or neutrons are created in such a way that they are linked and behave as if they were one entity, even if they are physically separated. In a groundbreaking experiment led by Professor Jian-Wei Pan of Hefei University in China, a laser on a satellite orbiting 300 miles above the earth produced entangled photons. They were then transmitted to two different ground-based stations 750 miles apart, without breaking the link between the photons, the researchers said.

That distance is 10 times greater than the previous record for entanglement. The experiment also marked the first time entangled photons were generated in space. Both stations are in the mountains of Tibet, at a height that reduced the amount of air the fragile photons had to traverse. “It’s a huge, major achievement,” Thomas Jennewein, physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told Science. “They started with this bold idea and managed to do it.”