Quanten-News: Thursday, August 6, 2026

NIST, the University of Maryland, and Qunnect demonstrated quantum entanglement distribution over a 62 km metropolitan aerial fiber link — not lab fiber, but real deployed infrastructure subject to thermal and mechanical noise. Using automated polarization compensation, they maintained 1,500 entangled photon pairs per second and violated Bell inequalities for over 20 continuous hours, directly validating that quantum networks can be built on existing commercial fiber without special-purpose fiber installation. IonQ had a strong defense day: a $28 million DARPA contract extension to produce 125 compact Evergreen-05 optical atomic clocks for government use, plus a new contract with the NRO for its radar satellite subsidiary Capella — a sign that trapped-ion precision is finding non-computing applications in national security. On the communications side, Quantum Corridor, Ciena, and Toshiba completed a 1.6 Tb/s quantum-safe optical encryption milestone on a live commercial network, the highest throughput quantum-safe link demonstrated in production. And in photonics, researchers achieved 50% transmission efficiency for entangled photon emission from quantum dots, doubling previous records and moving photonic qubits closer to practical network use.

• NIST, UMD, and Qunnect demonstrate quantum entanglement over 62 km metropolitan aerial fiber — 1,500 pairs/sec, 20+ hours continuous

  Quantum Computing Report

• IonQ awarded $28M DARPA contract for 125 Evergreen-05 atomic clocks plus NRO radar satellite contract

  Quantum Computing Report

• Quantum Corridor, Ciena, and Toshiba complete 1.6 Tb/s quantum-safe optical encryption on live commercial network

  QuantumWire

• Quantum dots emit entangled photons at 50% transmission efficiency — new photonic qubit record

  Quantum Zeitgeist