^{By Inés Urdaneta, Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The Illinois‐Express Quantum Network (IEQNET), a collaboration that includes the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator and Argonne National laboratories, Northwestern University and Caltech, has achieved the first steps toward a functional long-distance quantum network running on telecom fiber optics. Using local fiber optics, the team of researchers successfully deployed the quantum network between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, 50 kilometers apart.

In this system, information is encoded through quantum entangled photons, and the challenge remains in being able to transfer this information across distances and scales without losing coherence, feature that guarantees that there has been no loss of information. Preserving information is key to any informatic system; all our digital activities require that the information transfer is securely transferred.

A way of measuring the degree of information...