Quantum Key Exchange With an Airplane

submeta writes "Researchers in Munich have successfully performed a quantum key exchange between a moving aircraft and a ground station. Quantum key distribution, which exploits the phenomenon of entanglement, offers theoretically perfect encryption (although it can be vulnerable in practice). This advance is an important step on the way to key exchange with a satellite, which could enable practical usage of the technology."

This post is relevant to my interests

[AikonMGB]

Quantum key exchange via satellite: QEYSSat [qeyssat.com].

Re:A little unclear on entanglement

[Anonymous Coward]

It does imply faster than light propagation of states, but unfortunately it is not possible to use this effect to communicate information from one place to another. Observing the pair at either end breaks the entanglement immediately (faster than light), but there's no way to tell from one end if the entanglement has been broken, so you could imagine that the universe is talking to itself at faster than light speed, but you can't hear what it's saying.

Re:A little unclear on entanglement

[camperdave]

No. It's kind of like flipping a coin. If you know one side is heads, you automatically know that the other side is tails no matter how far apart the sides of the coin are. Quantum Entangling photons is kind of like splitting the coin in half.