US team achieves 99% fidelity in quantum communication breakthrough

A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum communication by generating entangled photons at a telecom-band wavelength of 1389 nm using an array of ytterbium-171 (¹⁷¹Yb) atoms. This development enables high-fidelity (up to 99%) entanglement directly compatible with existing fiber-optic infrastructure, overcoming previous challenges related to signal degradation and efficiency loss caused by wavelength conversion. The team’s approach allows for parallelized entanglement generation across multiple atoms projected onto a commercial fiber array, significantly enhancing the scalability and performance of quantum networks. This scalable quantum networking architecture supports simultaneous, uniform, and high-fidelity entanglement across interconnected nodes with minimal crosstalk, a critical requirement for reliable quantum communication. Additionally, the researchers introduced a mid-circuit networking protocol to maintain coherence of data qubits during network operations, ensuring data stability even when multiple connections are active. Their findings indicate that with minor technical improvements,