• The secret to a more secure and powerful internet — one potentially impossible to hack — might be residing in a basement closet seemingly suited for brooms and mops.
• The 3-foot-wide cubby, in the bowels of a University of Chicago laboratory, contains a slim rack of hardware discreetly firing quantum particles into a fiber-optic network.
• The goal: to use nature’s smallest objects to share information under encryption that cannot be broken — and eventually to connect a network of quantum computers capable of herculean calculations.
• The modest trappings of Equipment Closet LL211A belie the importance of a project at the forefront of one of the world’s hottest technology competitions.
• The United States, China and others are vying to harness the bizarre properties of quantum particles to process information in powerful new ways — technology that could confer major economic and national-security benefits to the countries that dominate it.

Tagged: Futurism