Quantum computers, like this IBM model, look like science fiction come to life. (Credit: Graham Carlow for IBM)
The massive intersection of Janes Avenue and East Boughton Road in Bolingbrook, Illinois, looks like many other crossroads in suburban America. A drive-through Starbucks keeps watch over 15 lanes of turning and merging mid-size SUVs, most headed for the sprawling parking lots of the Promenade shopping mall to the south, a few others en route to the shooting gallery and gun shop across Interstate 355 to the east.
Few of the people in the SUVs realize they’re driving over part of America’s blossoming research into quantum information technology. Beneath the interstate, entangled photons quantum particles moving at the speed of light are teleporting to and from the Argonne National Laboratory in the next town over, through repurposed fiber-optic cables that make up one of the longest land-based quantum networks in the nation.