China's victory over hackers and spooks

Nick Wigham reports at News.com,

China has scored a victory against hackers and spooks as it surges ahead of other world powers in a new kind of space race.

IN A bid to build an entirely new kind of internet — completely secure and impervious to hackers — China has pulled off a major feat in particle physics.

Chinese scientists have set a new distance record for beaming a pair of entangled particles: photons of light that behave like twins and experience the exact same things simultaneously, even though they’re separated by great distances.

The principle is called quantum entanglement and it’s one of the subatomic world’s weirdest phenomena. And China has smashed the distance record for quantum entanglement.

In a groundbreaking experiment led by Professor Jian-Wei Pan of Hefei University in China, a laser on a satellite orbiting 480 kilometres above the earth produced entangled photons.

They were then transmitted to two different ground-based stations 1200 kilometres apart, without breaking the link between the photons, the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science.

That distance achieved in the experiment is 10 times greater than the previous record for entanglement and is also the first time entangled photons have been generated in space.

“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.”

China launched its first quantum satellite in August and if all goes according to plan will send up plenty more to create a system of communication which relies on entanglement.

...China has not disclosed how much money it has spent on Quantum research, but funding for basic research which includes quantum physics was $US101 billion in 2015 — an absolutely massive increase from the $US1.9 billion the country spent in 2005.
Scientists in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan are also rushing to exploit the power of particle physics to create secure communication systems, but China’s latest experiment puts the country well ahead of the pack.