A new photonic switch can route fragile quantum data at speeds of 1 GHz without breaking the "entanglement" that makes it work.
April 24, 2026
Original Paper
A Universal Quantum Information Preserving Photonic Switch for Scalable Quantum Networks
arXiv · 2604.21902
The Takeaway
Transferring quantum information is notoriously difficult because even a tiny disturbance can destroy the data. This device achieves less than 4% decoherence, keeping the quantum states intact even at extremely high speeds. This breakthrough makes a quantum internet physically feasible by providing the hardware needed to switch data between users. Until now, routing quantum signals usually meant losing the very properties that make them useful. This switch could be the backbone of future secure communications networks that are impossible to hack. It brings us one step closer to a global quantum network.
From the abstract
Quantum networks are a keystone of the quantum internet. However, existing implementations remain largely confined to static point-to-point links due to the absence of a switching paradigm capable of dynamically routing fragile quantum entanglement without introducing decoherence. Here, we propose the Universal Quantum Switch, a foundational building block allowing on-demand, non-blocking, and encoding-agnostic routing of quantum information, as well as seamless modality conversion between dispa