Qunnect was awarded two SBIR awards from the US Department of Energy totaling $1.85M for the development and commercialization of the company’s Quantum Repeater product suite. When complete, this collection of devices supports the next generation of quantum-secure communication protocols to distribute entanglement, a unique quantum property of light, over long distances.
n September 2021, Qunnect sold the world’s first commercial quantum memory, one of two essential devices in the suite. The US DoE awards support the commercialization of the second essential device, a source, which generates entangled photon pairs for quantum-secure communication protocols, and the basic research underlying a second type of quantum memory.
Unlike other commercially available entanglement sources, Qunnect’s source produces a pair of photons where one possesses a standard telecommunications frequency for fiber transmission, and the other is tuned for optimal storage in the quantum memory. This innovation eliminates the need for a separate frequency converter device within the network, a significant feat, as the majority of quantum systems are not native to telecommunications frequencies. This product has broader utility as it is the first commercial source designed to provide a low loss interface between atomic-based devices (e.g., quantum computer, quantum sensors, etc) and telecommunication networks.
Qunnect’s devices do not require extreme cooling or vacuum support infrastructure for operation and are housed in a standard server rack-drawer form factor. These features are a key design consideration for real-world deployment and scalability. The other products in development are a network protocol orchestrator, an ultra-stable frequency reference, a real-time fiber channel calibrator, and a measurement station to perform the entanglement distribution transactions.
