Quantum Network Infographics

Notes we took while learning about quantum networking, written up as long-scrolling pages — from what is a qubit through entanglement distribution and protocols to vendors and TRL. Not authoritative; just what we've understood so far. Each page stands alone.

One of the motivations was to put accurate animations on the concepts that are hard to picture from text alone — entanglement generation, swapping, teleportation, the fibre-photon-pBSM pipeline. Where a still image gets fuzzy, the animation should make the order of operations and the resource flow unambiguous.

A caveat on the data. A large part of the data collection, table-building, and prose drafting is done with AI assistance. Hallucinations are getting rarer but they still slip in occasionally. If you spot an error, have more current information, or have ideas for how to animate one of these concepts, please reach out to us.

Inspired by Aliro, The Evolution of Quantum Repeaters

A useful one-glance picture of what a quantum network does. Four primitives — heralded entanglement generation (HEG), heralded entanglement purification (HEP), swapping, and teleportation — composed in roughly that order to deliver an end-to-end Bell pair and then consume it. Each row shows the network state before and after the operation; the rest of this site unpacks them. Only HEG uses an active quantum channel at runtime (the blue line carrying photons to the BSA — fibre, free-space optical, or another medium); the other three are local matter operations and need classical channels only.

Available now

Foundations

Qubits

Modalities, encodings, what 0 and 1 actually mean in each platform — the vocabulary every other subject builds on.

Foundations

Entanglement

What makes the network-relevant correlations stronger than classical correlation, and why Bell pairs are the resource quantum networks deliver.

Foundations

Teleportation

How a shared Bell pair plus two classical bits transfers an unknown qubit. The fundamental quantum-internet primitive — the network's replacement for sending a copy.

Foundations

Swapping

Bell-state measurement at a relay station joins two Bell pairs into one across a longer distance, without the endpoints ever interacting. The primitive every memory-based repeater is built on.

Foundations

Purification

Why fidelity matters for distributed protocols, and the BBPSSW pattern of trading two low-fidelity pairs for one higher-fidelity pair. Also called distillation.

Foundations

Loss & Errors

The two impairments a quantum network has to manage — channel loss (which HEG fights) and qubit errors as fidelity + decoherence (which HEP fights). Grounded in fibre 0.20 dB/km, hollow-core 0.091 dB/km, memory T₂, and Bell-pair fidelity thresholds.

Components

Quantum memories

Storage time, fidelity, and TRL across atomic ensembles, trapped ions, solid-state defects, quantum dots, photonic, and superconducting memories.

Components

Transduction

Bridging microwave qubits to telecom and visible-band photons to telecom — the two open problems on the frequency axis.

Components

Spectrum

Eleven qubit, memory, and photon-source platforms placed by transition frequency, with vendor flagship machines and the C-band fibre window.

Network

Entanglement distribution

Multi-hop swap chains, why MidpointSource wins on long links, and the layered service contract of an entanglement-delivery network.

Network

Quantum repeaters

Three architectural families compared side by side, including the 50 % linear-optics BSM ceiling and the boosted-BSM workarounds.

Network

All-photonic repeaters

Tree- and graph-state distribution as an alternative to memory-based repeaters — Azuma 2015 and the architectures it inspired.

Network

Links

Where each link medium wins on loss, latency, and reach. ITU fibre bands, hollow-core attenuation, FSO atmospheric turbulence, and Micius-style satellite links.

Network

Stacks

Wehner / Van Meter / RFC 9340 stacks side by side, the link-layer service primitive, and how naming and addressing are deliberately deferred.

Applications

Applications

QKD, distributed quantum computing, blind quantum computing, networked sensing, and clock synchronisation — what each needs from the network.

Applications

Maturity & TRL

Purohit's QTRL framework over Meddeb's per-platform memory-TRL benchmark, with capability-aware ratings rather than one-size-fits-all numbers.

Ecosystem

Companies

A growing per-vendor index with milestone timelines, public roadmaps, and links to canonical announcements. Maintained as the field evolves.

Ecosystem

Academia

Sibling to Companies — university research groups and principal investigators (Pan Jianwei at USTC, Lukin at Harvard, Hanson at Delft, Simmons at UNSW, …) carrying the field's experimental load. Same dossier shape as Companies, scoped to academic teams.

Ecosystem

Case studies

Operational and recently-operating quantum networks profiled with operator, location, technology family, scale, status, and commercial model. Covers commercial QKD trunks, entanglement-based testbeds, and the new commercial QNaaS model.

Reference

Records

Distance and time records for QKD, entanglement distribution, qubit coherence, and memory storage — sortable tables grounded in primary peer-reviewed sources.

Reference

Standards

A live catalogue of quantum-tech standards and standardisation work across ITU-T, ETSI, IETF, IEEE, ISO/IEC, GSMA, and national bodies. Filterable by topic (QKD protocol, QKD network, entanglement-based quantum network, security, sensing, QRNG, crypto, policy) and status.