Spooqy NewsNews on quantum information, quantum cryptography, and quantum networks.https://spooqy.news/2026-07-23T00:00:00ZSpooqy NewsPicosecond-resolved entanglement distribution over urban free-space channelhttps://spooqy.news/picosecond-resolved-entanglement-distribution-urban-free-space/2026-07-23T00:00:00Z2026-07-23T00:00:00ZEntangled photons whose state evolves in time have been distributed across 270 metres of open air between buildings in central Rome, with synchronisation held under 50 picoseconds. The link is short and rooftop-to-rooftop, so the result is a timing benchmark for satellite channels rather than a deployment.Photon Queue Raises $4M to Commercialize Room-Temperature Quantum Memoryhttps://spooqy.news/photon-queue-raises-4m-seed-room-temperature-quantum-memory/2026-07-21T00:00:00Z2026-07-21T00:00:00ZPhoton Queue, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spin-out, has closed a $4 million seed round to commercialise quantum memory that runs without cryogenics, aimed at buffering single photons between chips and nodes. Whether it works is a question of storage time, retrieval efficiency, and added noise, figures the announcement does not give.Arq Quantum Technologies Secures $1.4M Pre-Seed for Multiplexed Quantum Repeatershttps://spooqy.news/arq-quantum-technologies-secures-funding-multiplexed-quantum-repeaters/2026-07-16T00:00:00Z2026-07-16T00:00:00ZArq Quantum Technologies, a Spanish startup founded in 2025, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding to build multiplexed solid-state quantum memories for repeaters, competing on reproducibility rather than record performance. Pre-seed money buys a laboratory rather than a product, and laboratory repeater demonstrations already exist.Quantum Keys Cross the Fibre–Air Border Without a Trusted Guardhttps://spooqy.news/end-to-end-qkd-hybrid-fiber-free-space/2026-07-14T00:00:00Z2026-07-14T00:00:00ZA quantum-key-distribution link has carried keys from fibre through 90 metres of open air and back, converting between time-bin and polarisation encodings without measuring anything. That keeps the converters inside the untrusted channel rather than adding another trusted relay, though the source and detectors must still be trusted.Metropolitan QKD Network Deployed in Milanhttps://spooqy.news/metropolitan-qkd-network-milan/2026-07-13T00:00:00Z2026-07-13T00:00:00ZA quantum-key-distribution network linking data centres in Milan has been run over already-installed fibre, with software-defined control rerouting around failures while applications carried on unmodified. The routing depends on trusted nodes, where the key exists in the clear, so end-to-end security still rests on every intermediate site.Lying Is Easy in High Dimensionshttps://spooqy.news/lying-is-easy-in-high-dimensions/2026-06-19T00:00:00Z2026-06-19T00:00:00ZA new result shows that a separable state, with no entanglement at all, can pass a standard high-dimensional entanglement test, exploiting measurement deviations too small to notice. The larger the state space, the more room a device has to conceal such a deviation. The remedy is to certify from output statistics alone, as a device-independent test does, rather than trusting the box.Entanglement, Space-Qualifiedhttps://spooqy.news/entanglement-space-qualified/2026-06-19T00:00:00Z2026-06-19T00:00:00ZBoeing's Q4S satellite payload has demonstrated high-fidelity entanglement swapping, the operation that entangles two particles that never met, within the power and weight budget of spaceflight, and has passed environmental qualification ahead of a 2027 launch. Distance is the main obstacle to entanglement over fibre, and a satellite reduces it: a piece of a global quantum network's backbone, going to orbit.The Network of Theseushttps://spooqy.news/the-network-of-theseus/2026-06-18T00:00:00Z2026-06-18T00:00:00ZA new metro-QKD product promises quantum security deployable across your existing network, with no rip-and-replace. Quantum and classical light can share one fibre, which is real, but a quantum state cannot survive the amplifiers, regenerators and switches of a metro network, so covering a city means a trusted node at every hop. The trench stays and the network inside it is rebuilt, as the company's own datasheet describes.Bell Was Only Ever About Twohttps://spooqy.news/bell-was-only-ever-about-two/2026-06-16T00:00:00Z2026-06-16T00:00:00ZDevice independence has largely been a two-party story: Alice, Bob, one Bell violation. But a trustless quantum internet is a network, and it runs on multipartite nonlocality. Christopher Monroe's group reports the first fully distributed three-node GHZ state across separate atomic memories, closing the detection loophole in a distributed multipartite state for the first time: the physical substrate a many-party trustless network needs.The Randomness Your Enemy Helped Writehttps://spooqy.news/the-randomness-your-enemy-helped-write/2026-06-11T00:00:00Z2026-06-11T00:00:00ZRandomness amplification distils private, uniform bits from a Santha–Vazirani seed an adversary already partly knows. A new result puts it on an integrated silicon-photonic chip at 20 Mbps. The guarantee is conditional: it holds only while the source stays below about 0.0185 photons per pulse, a bound the chip enforces by monitoring its own power meter, the same kind of self-monitoring a detector-blinding attack previously subverted.The Entangled Atlantic Crossinghttps://spooqy.news/the-entangled-atlantic-crossing/2026-06-09T00:00:00Z2026-06-09T00:00:00ZA feasibility study asks what a transatlantic quantum link could look like with today's hardware, no memories and no repeaters: an entangled-photon source on a low-orbit satellite, two passive stratospheric relays, and around five million secure key bits a year across 6,500 kilometres. It distributes entanglement rather than relaying a key, but a relay's passivity cannot be verified from the ground, and only a Bell test between the two shores would certify that nothing in the middle interfered.Three Hundred Kilometres, One Trusted Middlehttps://spooqy.news/three-hundred-kilometres-one-trusted-middle/2026-06-05T00:00:00Z2026-06-05T00:00:00ZA Swedish team has carried a secret key 303 kilometres across live, deployed fibre, three times the no-trust distance record, but only by joining two links through a trusted relay in the middle that reads the key in the clear. Device independence is the approach that removes that node. The yield is low and bursty, shown as a one-time-pad image degrading as the key budget runs low.Device-Independence Learns to Scalehttps://spooqy.news/device-independence-learns-to-scale/2026-05-15T00:00:00Z2026-05-15T00:00:00ZDevice independence recently moved beyond the lab over 100 km of fibre. A new result addresses the certification beneath it: self-testing almost any quantum state with polynomial rather than exponential sample cost, removing the main obstacle to zero-trust auditing at network scale.Entanglement First, Fundedhttps://spooqy.news/entanglement-first-funded/2026-05-13T00:00:00Z2026-05-13T00:00:00ZPhotonic has closed a $200-million round at a $2-billion valuation on an architecture it calls Entanglement First: silicon T-centre spin qubits that emit telecom-band photons and link across ordinary installed fibre with no wavelength conversion. The destination is computation, but distributing entanglement over deployed fibre, rather than confining it to a chip, is also what a quantum network needs.The Alarm Was the Way Inhttps://spooqy.news/the-alarm-was-the-way-in/2026-05-06T00:00:00Z2026-05-06T00:00:00ZContinuous-variable QKD judges itself safe by measuring one number, the excess noise an eavesdropper adds. One new experiment blinds the detector so it mis-measures that number; another shifts a detector's click timing with pulse energy to flip recorded bits. Two hardware attacks in one season, both leaving the mathematics intact and breaking assumptions nobody had written down, are the standing case for certifying security from a signal no box has to be trusted to report.Nobody Was Looking at the Sourcehttps://spooqy.news/nobody-was-looking-at-the-source/2026-04-20T00:00:00Z2026-04-20T00:00:00ZFor a decade, measurement-device-independent QKD focused on not trusting the detectors, while the source stayed trusted throughout. A group with a hardware background has now built the first discrete-variable one-sided device-independent QKD, treating the transmitter as a largely black-box component: an intermediate step toward full trustlessness, at 1 kbps over 20 km of fibre.The Communication Qubithttps://spooqy.news/the-communication-qubit/2026-04-15T00:00:00Z2026-04-15T00:00:00ZDARPA's HARQ program backs heterogeneous machines that combine qubit types — some to compute, some to remember, some to communicate — and IonQ, one of its performers, has networked two of its trapped-ion computers through photons. Naming communication a first-class role is useful, but the word covers two jobs: a trusted bus between parts you own, and a link between strangers where trust must be removed. What matters for the second is what a link can prove about itself, not the fidelity of the interconnect.Quantum Sovereignty for Indiahttps://spooqy.news/quantum-sovereignty-for-india/2026-04-10T00:00:00Z2026-04-10T00:00:00ZIndia has carried a quantum key a thousand kilometres on home-grown equipment, less than two years into its National Quantum Mission, in the spirit of Make in India. But owning the machines is only the first layer: a thousand-kilometre key still runs through trusted relay nodes that must be taken on faith. The approach that depends on no node at all is device independence, which points to a fuller sense of sovereignty than owning the hardware.The Seed You Get to Keephttps://spooqy.news/the-seed-you-get-to-keep/2026-04-08T00:00:00Z2026-04-08T00:00:00ZRandomness expansion turns a short trusted seed into a longer certified stream, but choosing what to measure each round consumes randomness of its own, leaving the net gain small. A new result reduces that cost by recycling the input rather than spending it, reaching expansion in as few as a hundred thousand rounds, secure against a quantum adversary and with no dimension or energy bound, leaving the trust in a single testing photodiode. Full device independence removes even that, certifying the randomness from a Bell violation.A Theorem That Survives the Labhttps://spooqy.news/a-theorem-that-survives-the-lab/2026-04-08T00:00:00Z2026-04-08T00:00:00ZThe quantum marginal problem asks whether a multiparticle state is fixed uniquely by its local parts, previously known only for perfectly measured marginals. A new result proves the determination is robust: measure the parts slightly wrong and the reconstructed whole is off by no more than a fixed power of that error. It yields a scalable witness for genuine multipartite entanglement, the kind of check a trustless network needs, since it cannot build on a resource it cannot verify.The 2025 Turing Awardhttps://spooqy.news/the-2025-turing-award/2026-03-19T00:00:00Z2026-03-19T00:00:00ZThe 2025 ACM Turing Award has gone to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, who founded quantum cryptography. In 1984, building on Stephen Wiesner's ideas, their BB84 protocol proposed that two strangers could share a secret whose safety rested on the laws of physics rather than the difficulty of a computation, secure against any computer, quantum ones included.Britain's £2 Billion Quantum Bethttps://spooqy.news/britains-two-billion-quantum-bet/2026-03-18T00:00:00Z2026-03-18T00:00:00ZBritain has committed up to £2 billion to quantum technology, with £125 million for quantum networking and BT building quantum-secure networks, delivered partly through ProQure, a programme that turns government procurement into a lever to scale the hardware. The consequential choice is what the network is required to trust: a specification that asks it to trust no node in the middle points to a sturdier architecture than one built on trusted relays.Value With No Expiry Datehttps://spooqy.news/value-with-no-expiry-date/2026-03-10T00:00:00Z2026-03-10T00:00:00ZMost security guarantees are computational: they hold only while some problem stays hard, an assumption with a hidden expiry date. A new proof establishes uncloneable encryption with information-theoretic security — two non-communicating parties given the same key cannot both decrypt one ciphertext — with no computational assumption anywhere. The primitive beneath quantum money is shown to rest on physics rather than on hardness a future machine might dissolve.The Wrong Resource to Counthttps://spooqy.news/the-wrong-resource-to-count/2026-03-09T00:00:00Z2026-03-09T00:00:00ZEntanglement-based QKD rests on the premise that distributing entanglement buys security. A new result shows that for the announced-basis protocols people actually build, a faint leak of side information leaves a family of genuinely entangled isotropic states from which no key can be drawn. What secures a task is the structure of the correlation, contextuality, rather than the quantity of entanglement.Open Access, and What Comes Nexthttps://spooqy.news/open-access-and-what-comes-next/2026-02-25T00:00:00Z2026-02-25T00:00:00ZABQ-Net has gone live in Albuquerque — America's first open-access, entanglement-based quantum network, two nodes over ordinary metro fibre, open to any user. On a shared network the question shifts from trusting your own link to what you can verify for yourself, which is the setting device independence is built for: letting strangers share one wire without trusting each other.One Hundred Kilometres, No Trust Requiredhttps://spooqy.news/one-hundred-kilometres-no-trust-required/2026-02-06T00:00:00Z2026-02-06T00:00:00ZDevice-independent QKD, which certifies security from measurement statistics rather than from trust in the hardware, has been run over 100 kilometres of fibre for the first time. Single trapped atoms close the detection loophole; at 11 km a key took twenty-six days of running, and at the full distance the rate is positive only asymptotically, so the result demonstrates reach rather than a usable link.