Recently, Prof. Pan Jianwei and his research group of USTC has made significant progress on practical quantum communication, and built the world's first photonic telephone network in Hefei, capital city of Anhui province, thus the absolutely secure quantum communication has been applied in daily life. Through commercial optical fiber network, multiple users can communicate absolutely securely by quantum telephone. The successful research on quantum telephone network has demonstrated its practical value for the first time. In April 2009, this result was published in Optics Express, one of the internationally renowned journals in the field of optics, then was quickly reported by Science titled “Quantum Phone Calls".
Quantum communication possesses the feature of absolute security which the traditional means of communication do not have. And this provides great prospects and application value in information security field such as national security as well as finance. To turn quantum communication from theory to reality, and the absolute security of theoretical predictions to a real new means of secure communication, from 1990s, scientists both domestic and worldwide have done a lot of research. At the early stage of research, although the quantum communication was the only known secure means of communication, due to the imperfect nature of real systems and the lack of true quantum single-photon sources, the secure communication rate of quantum communication systems has declined sharply with increasing distance, and the secure communication distance was only at the order of 10 km . Due to the poor speed of quantum communication, scientists have to simulate the real-time communication only by repeatedly using the same set of secure keys, which has limited the quantum communication systems only in the laboratory.
The group members including Pan Jianwei, Chen Zengbing and Peng Chengzhi have carried out practical research on quantum communication, and successfully developed quantum phone prototype. They also constructed photonic telephone network which can be freely expanded based on the commercial fiber network(as shown in the picture). This research is in the leading position worldwide in the field of practical quantum communication. Just as Science comment on it: With such presentation, "quantum privacy" will not be a very distant future in your own home.
The experiments carried out by Prof. Pan Jianwei and his group on the basis of the standard general-purpose optical fiber mostly use the devices that have been developed in classical optical communication. The main performance of some key devices has reached or exceeded the similar products in the world. Successive breakthroughs in practical quantum communication and its core technologies of network made by Prof. Pan Jianwei and his group indicate the time to realize the industrialization of quantum communication technology has already come in China.