Sometimes, a new piece of technology, civilian or military, comes along that is a real game-changer: Armor, archery, gunpowder, and the internal combustion engine. One such thing was radar; during the Battle of Britain, German fighter pilots and bomber crews were surprised to find that every time they crossed the English Channel, there seemed to be flights of Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires that knew just where to meet them. The secret didn't last long, and the Germans quickly learned to target British radars, but that initial phase caused more than a few German aviators to become maladjusted - and more than a few of them became either POWs or, as someone once most famously said, they were given six feet of English earth, and "dirt between their teeth."
Now, radar, in use almost everywhere, may be getting a major upgrade in its military applications. The new thing? Quantum radar. An American company, American Quantum Technology, LLC, has just been awarded an Australian patent for its quantum radar, and it sounds like pretty cool stuff.
American Quantum Technology, LLC (AQT), a leading innovator in quantum sensing technology, is proud to announce that IP Australia has granted patent 2022382926 for its quantum entanglement enhanced radar technology. This milestone underscores AQT’s commitment to developing quantum-based defense applications for the U.S. military and its closest allies worldwide.
With this approval, Australia joins the United States and Japan in recognizing the strategic importance of quantum entanglement enhanced radar synchronization. As a key Pacific ally, AUKUS partner, and Five Eyes member, Australia’s grant strengthens trilateral and multilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Amid rising GPS spoofing and jamming threats from adversaries in contested regions, this technology delivers sub-picosecond precision and robust performance independent of vulnerable GPS signals.
You can see the actual patent here. So, how does this thing work? Here's an excerpt from the patent:
The quantum interferometer device can include a quantum entanglement source that can be operable to transmit a first entangled photon to the transmitter radar and a second entangled photon to the receiver radar. The quantum interferometer device can further include a quantum entanglement detector that can be operable to receive the first entangled photon from the transmitter radar and the second entangled photon from the receiver radar. The quantum entanglement detector can be further operable to detect a quantum interference effect associated with the first entangled photon and the second entangled photon. The quantum interferometer device can synchronize a first time associated with the transmitter radar and a second time associated with the receiver radar based at least in part on the quantum interference effect associated with the first entangled photon and the second entangled photon.
OK, I didn't understand all of that either. Dammit, Jim, I'm a biologist, not a physicist! But what this looks like is a radar that generates a beam of entangled particles, photons, to be precise, then separates the photons into two beams; the signal beam converts to microwaves and is sent to reflect off a target, as in traditional radars. The other beam, called the "idler beam," stays in the transmitter - no, I don't know how, either - and when the scanning beam returns, its quantum state is compared to the idler beam's state. This - somehow - makes the radar far more able to track low-visibility targets, along with being harder to jam.
It's not an entirely new thingamajig; Lockheed Martin holds an American patent from 2008, US7375802B2, and an EU patent, EP1750145B1, on a similar setup. American Quantum Technologies also holds U.S. patent US12287425B2 for what they call the "Quantum entanglement enhanced radar."
The catch, as is always the case, is making the thing work in the field.
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If this works as advertised, this is the kind of breakthrough tech that can hand one side in a future conflict a very significant advantage, but only for a while. Just as the Germans not only figured radar out for themselves in 1941 and 1942, by the end of 1942, they had radar compact and lightweight enough to mount in aircraft, primarily night-fighters that were intercepting British nighttime bomber streams. The same would apply here, and this is the kind of thing that doesn't have to necessarily be developed by another nation from the ground up; all they would have to do is get hold of an intact unit, figure out the engineering, and then it's just a matter of building them. That, too, is just about as old as the history of human warfare.
There is a cool factor to things like this, though, even if it's hard to wrap your mind around exactly how they work. In one of my science fiction novels, I wanted to come up with an interstellar communications device that worked in real time, like on Star Trek. Star Trek just hand-waved away how you could call someone up who was 40 light-years away and have a conversation, but I tried to use some hooraw I made up called an "entangled pair communications device," or an EPCOM. Any real physicist who read my description of that would probably have burst out laughing.
When it comes to quantum radar, though, they aren't laughing. This is a development to keep an eye on.
