Can we use entangled particles to transmit information or data such as TCP/UDP packets?
If so why hasn't this been done yet? Surely the costs of bringing this to market are much cheaper than laying submarine cables?
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possible duplicate of Quantum entanglement: does it necessarily imply superluminal information transfer? – John Rennie Jun 17 '14 at 14:58
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1Entanglement is used as a means to create secure communication, but the essential information is still sent through a classical channel. – Raskolnikov Jun 17 '14 at 14:58
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The answer to "can we" is "no". Entanglement guarantees that two measurements will get the same answer, but there's no way to influence the outcome of a measurement from afar.
Even were this theoretically possible, it would still not be used in practice yet. (I list out some reasons below, because they at least apply to other proposed replacements or augmentations to computer communication, and are therefore somewhat interesting.)
- Laying sub-marine cables is cheap, simply by virtue of the fact that we've done it a lot.
- Entangling qubits, by contrast, is expensive, for the opposite reason.
- The engineering problems around quantum decoherence are not well-solved yet. Keeping the qubit state from being "corrupted" is a Hard Problem™.
- Most importantly, the requirements of any replacement for the undersea cable + satellite transmission system are incredibly rigorous. In particular, you must be able to support high bandwidth (many billions of bits transmitted per second) and low latency (nothing is allowed to take longer than 10 milliseconds). At this stage, any entanglement process is far too slow to manage this.
Scott Lawrence
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