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The quantum internet. Ultrafast and safe from hackers. With a foreword by Rupert Ursin. Translated by Andrea Aglibut. (English) Zbl 1454.81040

Cham: Springer (ISBN 978-3-030-42663-7/pbk; 978-3-030-42664-4/ebook). xvii, 269 p. (2020).
This fluid everyman’s explanation (no math) of basic concepts of promised era of quantum computers and quantum internet seems to be motivated by author’s desire to memorize scientific achievement of his home country Austria: the Chinese-Austrian joint project in 2017, when with split laser beam from Chinese satellite was established a record quantum link – 1200 km between China and Austria. The quantum entanglement – interdependence of states of qubits (Einstein’s “spooky action at distance”) allows to create the same random sequence at both linked states (a ‘shared secret’) which could serve as an encryption key, thus creating tamper-proof, safe from hackers information exchange. Ultra-secure information exchange is considered as the main application of quantum communication channels and the main topic of the book is explanation of related concepts, technologies and possible applications – qubits and entanglement, quantum logic, quantum cryptography, teleportation etc. However, some researchers consider the feasibility of quantum computing extremely doubtful since it is very error-prone, e.g. minimal change of temperature or vibration can break the link between entangled particles collapsing the connection. Possibilities of ‘what may go wrong’ are considered very briefly, but author warns: “the classical internet can never be completely replaced by quantum networks” (p.86), “...the quantum internet is ultimately not suitable for streaming, blogging or game downloading...e-mail and online business transactions will continue on the basis of classic internet” (p.254). The book could be useful for everyone who is interested in prospects of communication and not very keen on math formulae.

MSC:

81P45 Quantum information, communication, networks (quantum-theoretic aspects)
81P68 Quantum computation
81P94 Quantum cryptography (quantum-theoretic aspects)
81P48 LOCC, teleportation, dense coding, remote state operations, distillation
68M11 Internet topics
81P40 Quantum coherence, entanglement, quantum correlations
81V80 Quantum optics
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