by Stephen Chen
The breakthrough relies on a ghostly phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein dubbed “spooky action at a distance”
A top Chinese military technology company
shocked physicists around the world this week when it announced it had
developed a new form of radar able to detect stealth planes 100km away.
The breakthrough relies on a ghostly phenomenon
known as quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein dubbed “spooky
action at a distance”.
China Electronics Technology Group Corporation
(CETC), one of the “Top 10” military industry groups controlled directly
by the central government, said on Sunday that the new radar system’s
entangled photons had detected targets 100km away in a recent field
test.
That’s five times the “potential range” of a
laboratory prototype jointly developed by researchers from Canada,
Germany, Britain and the United States last year.
America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency has reportedly funded similar research and military suppliers
such as Lockheed Martin are also developing quantum radar systems for
combat purposes, according to media reports, but the progress of those
military projects remains unknown.
In a statement posted on its website on Sunday,
CETC said China’s first “single-photon quantum radar system” had
“important military application values” because it used entangled
photons to identify objects “invisible” to conventional radar systems.
Nanjing University physicist Professor Ma
Xiaosong, who has studied quantum radar, said he had “not seen anything
like this in an open report”.
“The effective range reported by the international research community falls far below 100km,” he said.
A military radar researcher at a university in
northwestern China said the actual range of the new radar could be even
greater than that announced by CETC.
“The figure in declassified documents is usually
a tuned-down version of the real [performance],” he said. “The
announcement has gone viral [in the radar research community].”
The scientists said they were shocked because,
until recently, the idea of quantum radar had remained largely confined
to science fiction.
Quantum physics says that if you create a pair
of entangled photons by splitting the original photon with a crystal, a
change to one entangled photon will immediately affect its twin,
regardless of the distance between them.
A quantum radar, generating a large number of
entangled photon pairs and shooting one twin into the air, would be
capable of receiving critical information about a target, including its
shape, location, speed, temperature and even the chemical composition of
its paint, from returning photons.
That sounds similar to a normal radar, which
uses radio waves, but quantum radar would be much better at detecting
stealth planes, which use special coating materials and body designs to
reduce the radio waves they deflect, making them indistinguishable from
the background environment.
In theory, a quantum radar could detect a
target’s composition, heading and speed even if managed to retrieve just
one returning photon. It would be able to fish out the returning photon
from the background noise because the link the photon shared with its
twin would facilitate identification.
However, Ma, who was not involved with the CETC
project, said serious technical challenges had long confined quantum
radar technology to the laboratory.
The photons had to maintain certain conditions –
known as quantum states – such as upward or downward spin to remain
entangled. But Ma said the quantum states could be lost due to
disturbances in the environment, a phenomenon known as “decoherence”,
which increased the risk of entanglement loss as the photons travelled
through the air, thus limiting the effective range of quantum radar.
The CETC breakthrough benefited largely from the
recent rapid development of single-photon detectors, which allowed
researchers to capture returning photons with a high degree of
efficiency.
CETC said the quantum radar’s advantage was not limited to the detection of stealth planes.
The field test had opened a “completely new area
of research”, it said, with potential for the development of highly
mobile and sensitive radar systems able to survive the most challenging
combat engagements.
Quantum radar systems could be small and would
be able to evade enemy countermeasures such anti-radar missiles because
the ghostly quantum entanglement could not be traced, it said.
The company said it had worked with quantum
scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China in
Hefei, Anhui province, where many quantum technology breakthroughs have
been achieved, including the world’s longest quantum key distribution
network for secured communication and the development of the world’s
first quantum satellite.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as:
Quantum radar ‘can see stealth planes at 100km’
Stephen Chen
Source: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2021235/end-stealth-new-chinese-radar-capable-detecting-invisible-targets-100km
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