WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 03: U.S. President Donald Trump’s name is seen recently placed on the outside of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) building headquarters on December 03, 2025 in Washington, DC. This addition was made ahead of the Trump administration hosting a deal-signing between the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Trump has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace … for himself. (snip)
“My bet is that all the problems we have right now will be solved if old folks get out of the way and we turn the reins over to this next generation that is coming up, so that they can bring those good old-fashioned American values to new sets of problems,” Obama said.
Former President Barack Obama speaks during day two of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, August 20, 2024. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
It would be easy for former President Barack Obama to get cynical.
The signature achievement of his two terms in office is on the brink of oblivion, and many of the progressive wins of his era have been rolled back by a reactionary presidency and a conservative Supreme Court. Still, the one-time organizer has hope that the next generation of lawmakers can fix the problems that plague the United States. Speaking at Crystal Bridges, the Arkansas art museum founded by the Walton family, he called on the Democratic Party‘s old guard to “get out of the way” of upstarts seeking change.
“My bet is that all the problems we have right now will be solved if old folks get out of the way and we turn the reins over to this next generation that is coming up, so that they can bring those good old-fashioned American values to new sets of problems,” Obama said.
The former president didn’t pretend that righting the ship would be easy. He said the United States is much “more divided” than it was when he left office in 2017.
“I think it is true that we are more divided and that our democracy is more unstable than any time in my lifetime, not in American history, I mean, we did have a Civil War,” he said. “I would not have expected the legitimacy of an election and the peaceful transfer of power to have been challenged. I thought that was not something that would happen today.”
He added that Democrats and Republican lawmakers are discouraged from working together, making compromise a risky proposition.
“You’ll hear voters asking, ‘Why can’t they just get along? Why can’t they get stuff done?’ The truth is, there are a bunch of structures that have been set up that don’t give them an incentive to work together. In fact, the opposite, they get punished,” he said.
Physicists from research groups at the University of Stuttgart, Saarbrücken, and Dresden conducting an experiment on quantum teleportation (left to right: Tobias Bauer, Marlon Schäfer, Caspar Hopfmann, Stefan Kazmaier, Tim Strobel, Simone Luca Portalupi). Credit: Julian Maisch
Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises more effective protection. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles.
Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the quantum repeater. They report their results in Nature Communications.
Nanometer-sized semiconductor islands for information transfer
“For the first time worldwide, we have succeeded in transferring quantum information among photons originating from two different quantum dots,” says Prof. Peter Michler, head of the IHFG and deputy spokesperson for the Quantenrepeater.Net (QR.N) research project.
What is the background? Whether WhatsApp or video stream, every digital message consists of zeros and ones. Similarly, this also applies to quantum communication, in which individual light particles serve as carriers of information.
Zero or one is then encoded in two different directions of polarization of the photons (i.e., their orientation in the horizontal and vertical directions or in a superposition of both states). Because photons follow the laws of quantum mechanics, their polarization cannot always be completely read out without leaving traces. Any attempt to intercept the transmission would inevitably be detected.
Making the quantum internet ready for the fiber-optic infrastructure
Another challenge: An affordable quantum internet would use optical fibers—just like today’s internet. However, light has only a limited range. Conventional light signals, therefore, need to be renewed approximately every 50 kilometers using an optical amplifier.
Because quantum information cannot simply be amplified or copied and forwarded, this does not work in the quantum internet. However, quantum physics allows information to be transferred from one photon to another as long as the information stays unknown. This process is referred to as quantum teleportation.
Quantum repeaters as nodes for information transmission
Building on this, physicists are developing quantum repeaters that renew quantum information before it is absorbed in the optical fiber. They are to serve as nodes for the quantum internet. However, there are considerable technical hurdles. To transmit quantum information via teleportation, the photons must be indistinguishable (i.e., they must have approximately the same temporal profile and color). This proves extremely difficult because they are generated at different locations from different sources.
“Light quanta from different quantum dots have never been teleported before because it is so challenging,” says Tim Strobel, scientist at the IHFG and first author of the study. As part of QR.N, his team has developed semiconductor light sources that generate almost identical photons.
“In these semiconductor islands, certain fixed energy levels are present, just like in an atom,” says Strobel. This allows individual photons with defined properties to be generated at the push of a button.
“Our partners at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden have developed quantum dots that differ only minimally,” says Strobel. This means that almost identical photons can be generated at two locations.
Information is ‘beamed’ from one photon to another
At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair.
Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.
Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University.
Improvements for reaching considerably greater distances
“Transferring quantum information between photons from different quantum dots is a crucial step toward bridging greater distances,” says Michler.
In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. “But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances,” says Strobel.
In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons.
“We want to reduce this by advancing semiconductor fabrication techniques,” says Strobel.
“Achieving this experiment has been a long-standing ambition — these results reflect years of scientific dedication and progress,” says Dr. Simone Luca Portalupi, group leader at the IHFG and one of the study coordinators. “It’s exciting to see how experiments focused on fundamental research are taking their first steps toward practical applications.”
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