The vacuum beam guide (VBG) presents a completely different solution for quantum communication channels to overcome the limitations of existing fiber and satellite technologies for long-distance quantum communication. With an array of aligned lenses spaced kilometers apart, the VBG offers ultra-high transparency over a wide range of optical bandwidth. Despite realistic imperfections, the VBG can outperform the best fiber by three orders of magnitude in terms of attenuation rate. The VBG can achieve an ultra-high quantum channel capacity beyond 10^13 qubit/sec over a continental scale, which is several orders of magnitude higher than the state-of-the-art quantum satellite communication rate. Remarkably, without relying on quantum repeaters, the VBG can provide a ground-based, low-loss, high-bandwidth quantum communication channel that enables novel distributed quantum information applications for computing, communication, and sensing.

Yesun is a graduate student from Prof. Liang Jiang's group, who obtained his bachelor’s degree in photoelectric Information Science from USTC in 2022, before which he studied quantum nonlinear optics. He now focuses on the systematic study of large-scale quantum distributed systems.