Towards a Slovenian Quantum Network

The European Union is currently preparing to implement the infrastructure for a Europe-wide network for quantum communication. To this purpose, research groups, industrial partners and government representatives from all European member states have devised projects to perform proof-of-principle demonstrations of quantum communication and quantum key distribution (QKD). To this end, quantum communication infrastructure will be implemented on the national level in all EU member states to later facilitate the inter-national connection of those networks. Our group and our faculty are integral parts of the Slovenian effort to implement such a quantum network, and we are confident that we will be able to begin implementing a Slovenian quantum network in autumn 2022.

In the next stage, the national network will be connected to neighboring countries as well as to an optical ground station to allow the sharing of quantum entanglement and quantum information via satellite links in the future. Moreover, steps will be taken to implement quantum repeaters, which promise allowing to share entanglement over very large distances. The sharing of entanglement via satellite links is illustrated in the schematic above.