click two stations · live weather · Jinan-1 ground track · real published physics · joint pass windows
JINAN-1 · tracking… · REPRESENTATIVE
⚛ What QuantumPulse is
Two tabs. Two real questions. Pick around.
Read this first. This is an exploration of the shape of quantum technology — not the physics itself. I’m not a quantum specialist and I’ve never claimed to be. Pretty much everything I know about quantum is right here in this toy: built from papers I half-read and half-understood, and math I mostly don’t. I just like the shape of it. Quantum scares a lot of people, and I figured if I could lay out the shape — what China’s satellite path is really doing versus America’s fiber path, where the real labs actually are — then at least the basics stop being a wall. It’s still advanced even at this level, but it’s the kindergarten version: a toy I learned on, the same way SnapBasin was my toy for water. If a real physicist looks at this and calls it junk — good. That means I drew the shape simple enough to see. Nothing here is certified by anybody of any caliber. So don’t trust it — do what Lester does — he’s a fictional character in the MPC Universe, not a real licensed engineer — and triangulate it yourself: read the Yin 2017 paper, the Liao 2018 paper, the Angulo 2024 preprint, click into the 18 labs on the map, go play the Qubit Game. The right answer isn’t on this page; it’s downstream of you doing the looking.
The two tabs
Photons → LEO — a world map of real QKD ground stations. Click any two stations, the page computes which kind of quantum link survives between them and tells you why. Jinan-1 (the Chinese quantum microsatellite, COSPAR 2022-087B) is the dot on the map, propagated by SGP4. It is tracked because it is still in orbit. Micius, which supplies every link number on this page, re-entered the atmosphere in January 2026 — the physics here is its, the ground track is not.Provenance on that, since this page is fussy about it elsewhere: the re-entry is from public tracking data, consistent with heightened drag at solar maximum. No official CAS statement was issued, and Celestrak now 404s on catalog number 41731, which is its own kind of confirmation.
Qubit Lab — a coupled bilayer qubit array with 5 toggles and 5 moves. Stabilize the array against decoherence. Each round has a hidden dominant noise channel; you can't see it directly, you have to read the toggles. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree are watching.
The two strategies underneath the Photons tab
The pins tell you where. The pairings tell you how:
🇨🇳 The Chinese satellite path. Entangled photons through ~10 km of atmosphere, bounce off a satellite in vacuum, beam back down. Continental range but needs the satellite overhead AND dark sky on both ends. Yin et al. 2017.
🇺🇸 The Western fiber path. Photons through standard telecom fiber. Works 24/7. Commercial kit needs a trusted node or repeater every ~50–100 km; twin-field QKD does not — it has gone 1,002 km with neither. On fiber spools, at 0.0034 bits per second. Toshiba, IDQ and others.
⚠ The two bets are a teaching device, not a scoreboard. Splitting it into “their satellite” and “our fiber” makes the trade-offs easy to see, and that is the only job it does here. It is not a map of who is doing what: China runs both, at scale, and the longest fiber results in this field are Chinese too. Keep the two-bets frame for the shape; do not read a national scoreboard out of it.
Buried vs aerial · the part this simulator cannot see
The fiber math on this page is loss versus distance. It has no idea whether the cable is buried in a conduit or hanging off a utility pole — and that turned out to be the thing that mattered.
Buried fiber is quiet. Isolated from weather and traffic, its polarization transformation can hold steady for hours. Most reported entanglement-distribution experiments have used buried fiber — the paper’s word is “most,” not “all.” Aerial is not virgin ground either: a plug-and-play QKD system was stability-tested over aerial cable in 2002 (Stucki et al., arXiv:quant-ph/0203118 — their aerial run was a separate 8.7–23.7 km test link at Ste Croix; the headline 67 km Geneva–Lausanne exchange went under Lake Geneva), and by 2018 there was a long-distance QKD field implementation over aerial fiber (Li et al., Opt. Express26, 22793). What this paper adds is polarization entanglement over that kind of fiber.
Aerial fiber moves. Wind, passing trucks, the sun heating the cable. On this link the polarization state drifted tens of degrees within seconds during the day, and “can remain stable for over tens of minutes” at night. Aerial fiber is, in the paper’s words, “typically considered unsuitable” for polarization-encoded quantum states.
NIST → University of Maryland. Run in early 2025, published July 2026. 62 km of deployed fiber, ~70% of it aerial, with active polarization compensation running the whole time: entanglement held for a continuous 24 hours, 92.8% uptime, CHSH violated for more than 20 of those hours. Switch the stabilization off and it dies in about 3 hours — and stays dead for the remaining ~13 hours of that 16-hour control run.
Two numbers this page’s spec line does not carry. That link measured ~18 dB end to end, but only ~12.4 dB is fiber; the other ~5.6 dB is field splices, patch panels and switches. And the campuses are ~29 km apart in a straight line — this page’s own great-circle, not the paper’s number — while the fiber is 62 km, because deployed cable follows poles and right-of-way, not the crow.
Why it is a big deal: it is not about reach. Reach was already solved — 155 km on metro fiber, 192 km on deployed fibre, 248 km on a transnational link, 1,200 km by satellite. And in 2026 a USTC group entangled two quantum memories through 420 km of fiber — a genuinely hard result at that loss budget, but both nodes sat in one laboratory with most of that fiber coiled on spools. Those kilometers are on a reel, not between two places. It is that a quantum link may not require trenching, drilling, or new cable under a seabed. It might run on some of what is already strung overhead — though aerial is, in the paper’s words, “a smaller yet non-negligible portion” of deployed fiber, not the bulk of it. One inherited ambiguity, disclosed rather than tidied: the paper uses “about 18 dB” twice for two different things — once as the end-to-end loss (“This end-to-end loss accounts for about 12.4 dB… and an additional 5.6 dB”) and once as what the aerial fiber alone introduces, with connectors and polarization controllers adding ~3 dB on top. The phrase “end to end” on this page is the paper’s own word from the first accounting. “21 dB” appears nowhere in the published article — it is 18+3 arithmetic, and this page does not print it as the paper’s.Sources → · See the NIST end on the Quantum Map →
Try this
On the Photons map, pair Beijing ↔ Vienna — see the Liao 2018 satellite intercontinental relay. Then pair Geneva ↔ Tokyo — see what fiber needs.
Click the 📍 Drop pin control top-left of the map and tap anywhere on Earth. Heads up: this control was built for Micius, which re-entered in early 2026; the pin points you to Space Pulse to do the same thing for the ISS, which is still flying.
Click Jinan-1 on the map — the popup shows its current position, and the orbit-trail buttons draw the last 12 or 24 hours of ground track so you can see where it has been.
Switch to Qubit Lab tab. Expand the Quick primer at the top, read the four hints, then play a round. The trick is figuring out which toggle dominates from what you observe, not from what the page tells you.
The design target
This isn't a daily-driver. It's a teacher's lesson-plan aid + a curious person's 5-minute "huh, cool" + a builder's gut-check against the published physics. Click around, find what interests you, then go do something else.
A two-tab quantum bundle. One tool, two questions.
Tab 1 — Photons → LEO. A simulator for comparing the two real approaches to long-distance quantum-secured communication.
🇨🇳 The Chinese satellite play. Beam entangled photons through ~10 km of atmosphere, bounce off a satellite in vacuum, beam back down. Proven by Mozi-1 / Micius (2016–2025; the satellite re-entered the atmosphere in Jan 2026). Weather- and day/night-limited but spans continental distances.
🇺🇸 The Western fiber play. Send photons through standard telecom fiber. With the commercial kit you need a trusted node or repeater every ~50–100 km. Works 24/7, no weather problem, but every hop is a chance to lose the link. The repeaterless limit itself has been beaten — 1,002 km, no nodes — but on spooled fiber at 0.0034 bits per second. That paper’s own survey keeps the columns apart: 830 km spooled, 511 km deployed. Reach on a reel and reach between two places are different problems, and the field knows it.
Where the negative-time demo went. The Angulo et al. 2024 rubidium-cloud “negative dwell time” experiment used to be a tab here; it now lives as an interactive on the Toronto pin in the Quantum Map sister tool.
Tab 2 — Qubit Lab. A coupled-bilayer qubit-array stabilization game. Five toggles (temperature, medium, polarity, spin axis, sheet coupling), five moves per round, random initial conditions, hidden dominant noise channel. The lesson is that the first toggle depends on what's actually limiting cohesion — and you can't see that directly. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree observe each move and the diagnosis at round end.
What's real here
Ground station locations are real published QKD facilities
Cloud cover and time-of-day come from live APIs (Open-Meteo, Sunrise-Sunset)
Jinan-1’s orbit is propagated via satellite.js — from a live Celestrak element set when the header badge says so, otherwise from a representative current-epoch TLE. The link physics is Micius/Yin 2017 and is labelled as such; a real ground track does not entitle this page to borrow another satellite’s optics.
Loss models use published parameters (Yin et al. 2017; Toshiba QKD specs)
Distances are real great-circle calculations
What's approximated
The TLE embedded here is a representative orbit; for current ops-grade tracking use Celestrak
Atmospheric loss is modeled as cloud-cover-modulated; real Micius operations also depend on aerosol, turbulence (r₀), and satellite elevation angle
Fiber key rates are first-order; real systems have detector dark counts, finite-key effects, and protocol-specific overhead (BB84, decoy-state, MDI-QKD)
How to use it
Click any glowing station on the map. It becomes endpoint A. Click another — endpoint B. The right panel shows you both bets running live. Move the repeater slider to see when the fiber play scales. Watch what happens when one endpoint is in daylight or under cloud cover.
▸ A word from our sponsor · you chose to look
🥧⚛️
QUANTUM OATS
the Breakfast of Entangled Champions
Two bowls, infinitely correlated — pour one in Beijing and the other’s already soggy in Vienna. Now fortified with fiber (the 1550 nm kind). Error-corrected below the threshold of hunger. Objects in bowl are closer than they appear.
Where we eat the shape till we understand it.
Then we go try the math.
And if the math makes sense — we keep walking the path.
Endorsed by NULL the Penguin 🐧 · funded by curiosity · User Zero approved
There’s no cereal. There’s no sponsor. You just clicked an ad on purpose — the most quantum thing you’ll do today. That was the whole point. 🦄
Sources & References
Primary papers
Yin, J. et al. (2017). "Satellite-based entanglement distribution over 1200 kilometers." Science 356, 1140–1144.
→ The Delingha–Nanshan / Lijiang experiment. Source for 64 dB measured channel loss, ~5.9 million pairs/sec generated (~1.1/sec detected).
Liao, S.-K. et al. (2018). "Satellite-relayed intercontinental quantum network." Phys. Rev. Lett.120, 030501. arXiv:1801.04418
→ Beijing–Vienna 7,600 km video call via Mozi-1 + ground networks. The source for the trusted-node note beside the satellite bet — four sentences quoted there, each matched character-for-character against the file on disk.
→ Provenance, and a disclosure this page owes you three times over. What is held here is 1801.04418v1.pdf (md5 0635abf9…), the arXiv preprint of 12 Jan 2018 — not the published PRL. The same is true of Luo et al. (2504.05660) and Angulo et al. (2409.03680): all three are cited above with journal, volume and article number, and for all three only the preprint has been opened here. This page tells you elsewhere to read the published version rather than the preprint, and on these three it is doing the opposite. Said out loud rather than left for a reader to find. For these particular sentences the two versions are very unlikely to differ — but nobody here has opened the PRL, so nobody here can say so.
Chen, Y.-A. et al. (2021). "An integrated space-to-ground quantum communication network over 4,600 kilometres." Nature 589, 214–219.
→ Beijing–Shanghai backbone integrated with Micius. 32 trusted nodes, 2,000 km fiber.
Shi, Y. et al. (2026). "Entanglement distribution over a polarization-stabilized aerial fiber." J. Opt. Commun. Netw.18, 813–819. doi:10.1364/JOCN.592521 · preprint: arXiv:2601.11753
→ Read the published version, not the preprint — they are not the same paper. Every figure this page quotes from the loss breakdown and the rate table (12.4 / 5.6 dB, 200 pairs/s, the local S = 2.69) exists only in the published article; none of it is in the January preprint. The published version also adds a reference at [17], which shifts every citation number after it by one. Pagination here is read off the article's own imprint line, 1943-0620/26/080813-07 — seven pages from 813.
→ NIST–UMD, 62 km of deployed fiber that is about 70% aerial — wind, traffic and sun on the cable instead of buried and quiet. This is the source for what the Western fiber play costs in the field. The link measured ~18 dB end to end, of which only ~12.4 dB is fiber attenuation (their assumed ~0.2 dB/km); the other ~5.6 dB is field splices, patch panels and optical switches. Rates depend on what is plugged in, so both numbers matter: about 1500 entangled pairs per second were detected with the polarization analyzers removed, while the CHSH measurements themselves peaked near 200 pairs/sec once the two analyzers added ~8 dB — 3 dB of it projection loss inherent to the measurement, ~5 dB insertion loss from the hardware. Locally, with both photons detected at the source, ~2×105 pairs/sec are measured; the ~21 dB between the two is ~18 dB of fiber plus ~3 dB of connectors and controllers. And the link is not symmetric: the signal photon is detected locally at NIST and only the idler makes the 62 km crossing, while a second, parallel fiber from the same TX/RX pair carries the timing. "It might run on what is already strung overhead" is true, but the unit is two strands, one-directional, one arm of the pair. Time-averaged S = 2.34 ± 0.37 over 24 h, violating the classical bound for more than 20 h; a single exemplary run gave S = 2.26 ± 0.04 against 2.69 ± 0.02 measured locally before transmission. Polarization compensation cost 7.2% of link time, leaving 92.8% uptime.
→ The control run is the number worth keeping. With stabilization switched off, S fell below the classical bound of 2 after about 3 h and no violation was seen for the ~13 h remainder of that 16 h measurement. Aerial fiber does not passively hold polarization — daytime drift is tens of degrees in seconds.
→ Objections, on the page: this is not a distance record. The same paper’s own bibliography carries longer fiber links — 155 km (Du et al., Newton 1, 100303, 2025), 192 km of deployed fibre (Wengerowsky et al., npj Quantum Inf. 6, 5, 2020) and a transnational 248 km link (Neumann et al., Nat. Commun. 13, 6134, 2022) — and the NIST release names the 248 km result in the same breath as denying a record. Since then a USTC group has gone to 420 km (Luo et al., see below), which the press reported as China pushing entanglement "across fiber" — while the paper says both memory nodes were "all located at a laboratory in USTC" and only about 10 km of that fiber left the building. Spool-kilometers and street-kilometers are not the same unit, and the number going up is not the same as the reach going out. What is new in the NIST result is aerial conditions, not reach. "Uptime" means 3-second distribution windows between compensation sessions, not 92.8% of full-rate throughput — and for scale, four of this paper’s twelve authors — the Qunnect four — are also on a 2024 paper over 34 km of deployed New York City fiber — which Shi et al. file under “buried optical fibers” in their own ref [16], so the buried-vs-aerial contrast holds — and its published abstract keeps three results deliberately apart: peak rates of nearly 5×105 pairs/sec; separately, ~99% fidelity at rates up to 2×104 pairs/sec; and lastly, 15 days continuous at 99.84% up-time. The high fidelity does not ride at the peak rate, and the up-time is not measured at it either (Craddock et al., PRX Quantum 5, 030330, 2024 — ref [16] of this very paper). Read against that, 62 km of aerial fiber at 92.8% is the price of the poles and the distance, which is the whole point. The CHSH measurement verifies entanglement; it is not a loophole-free Bell test and is not offered as one. Four of the twelve authors are at Qunnect Inc., whose stabilization modules are the device under test, while the paper’s Disclosures line reads "The authors declare no conflicts of interest"; NIST carries its standard commercial-identification disclaimer. Both are printed in the paper; weigh them yourself.
Li, Y. et al. (2025). “Microsatellite-based real-time quantum key distribution.” Nature640, 47–54. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08739-z · preprint arXiv:2408.10994
→ The source for every Jinan-1 figure on this page. 500 km Sun-synchronous orbit, 95.9 kg total with a 22.7 kg payload, launched 27 July 2022. Real-time QKD against ground stations at Jinan, Hefei, Wuhan and Nanshan; the published paper reports up to 1.07 million bits of secure key in a single pass, and links “locations separated by over 12,900 kilometres on Earth” — China to South Africa.
→ 🔴 A CORRECTION THIS PAGE OWES, AND IT RUNS THE WRONG WAY. This entry used to say: “The 12,900 km Beijing–Stellenbosch link is not from this paper. It is from a Chinese Academy of Sciences release of March 2025 and is cited here as that, not as peer-reviewed literature.”That was false. Stellenbosch is the headline result of the published Nature article, in its abstract. The August 2024 preprint predates the South Africa campaign, which is why it is absent from the version that was read here. The page downgraded a peer-reviewed Nature result to a press release — the fourth preprint-versus-published error in this project, and the only one that understated what is established rather than overstating it. Every other version trap here cost accuracy in the flattering direction. This one cost a real result its standing.
→ The 0.59 Mbit figure was the preprint’s ceiling (592,384 bits on 31 August 2023; 406,784 bits on 25 September 2022). The published figure is 1.07 million bits. Both are on the record; the published one governs.
→ Not asserted here: whether the Beijing–Stellenbosch link used the satellite as a trusted relay. A cold reader reports that it did, and the physics of two ground stations 12,900 km apart leaves little else — but the abstract does not say so and the full text has not been opened here, so this page does not claim it. It would be a second and more recent primary source for the trusted-node section further up, and it is worth going and getting.
→ Provenance: the preprint is held on disk and was read in full. The published Nature article has not been opened here — volume, page range, DOI, date and the two quoted figures come from the publisher’s own article page, which is why they are printed and the rest is not. No NORAD catalog number is printed anywhere on this page — it could not be verified from a primary source, so the tracker asks Celestrak for launch 2022-087 and matches the object by name rather than hardcoding a five-digit number nobody here confirmed. Same rule as Stucki and Kletetschka.
Liu, Y. et al. (2023). "Experimental Twin-Field Quantum Key Distribution over 1000 km Fiber Distance." Phys. Rev. Lett.130, 210801. arXiv:2303.15795
→ The result that dates the old version of this page. Twin-field QKD with the 3-intensity sending-or-not-sending protocol, 1,002 km, point to point, no trusted nodes and no repeaters — so "fiber dies past ~200 km without trusted nodes" was true of shipping decoy-BB84 kit and false as a statement about the fiber path. That correction is now on the page.
→ And the geometry, in the authors’ own bookkeeping. This is the part the coverage drops. The paper runs "over long distance fiber spools," with signals reaching the middle node "via 450 km (450 km) single mode fiber spools." And its own survey sentence keeps the categories separate: "up to 830-km spooled fiber, and in the field test through 511-km deployed fiber."Spooled and deployed are the field’s own two columns — this page did not invent the distinction, it just declines to collapse it.
→ The rate is the other half: 9.53×10-12 per pulse, which the paper itself converts to 0.0034 bits per second. Roughly one bit every five minutes. The repeaterless bound is beaten; the throughput is not a network.
→ Provenance: read from 2303.15795v1.pdf on disk (47 pp., md5 4e37b9f9…) — every quote above is from that file. The published PRL page was not reachable; the volume and article number come from the indexing record rather than the article, and are flagged as such here rather than presented as verified.
Yin, J. et al. (2020). "Entanglement-based secure quantum cryptography over 1,120 kilometres." Nature582, 501–505. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2401-y
→ The Delingha–Nanshan 1,120 km entanglement-based link, no trusted relay — quoted in the tool body and, until now, missing from this list entirely. That was a claim on the page a reader could not get to, which is the specific failure this Sources panel exists to prevent.
Luo, X.-Y. et al. (2026). “Entangling quantum memories through a 420 km long fiber.” Phys. Rev. Lett., doi:10.1103/ccd6-rf1s. Preprint: arXiv:2504.05660
→ The number this page was leaving on the floor, and it is the better one. The distance is not the result — beating the repeaterless bound is. Verbatim from the paper: “when channel transmittance is lower than 10−4.5 (which refers to a distance over 230 km in our experiment), the entangling probability in our experiment is higher than the PLOB bound.” The abstract puts it plainly: “the memory-memory entangling probability beats the repeaterless channel capacity for direct entanglement distribution.”
→ What that does and does not mean. The Pirandola–Laurenza–Ottaviani–Banchi bound caps direct transmission, where success scales with the channel transmittance η. A heralded memory scheme scales with √η, so beating the bound is not a violation of it — it is the demonstration that memories are worth the trouble. That is the actual answer to “why quantum memories,” and it is a better one than 420 km. The paper notes twin-field QKD gets the same scaling.
→ And the cost, from Table I. At 420 km the entangling probability is 1.09 × 10−6 per trial with signal-to-noise of 3.5 and 2.6 on the two Bell states — against 6.86 × 10−6 at 320 km. Thin, and the paper says so. The fiber figure is also not this page’s: they convert to telecom S-band at 1522 nm to get 0.17 dB/km, which is a spooled-lab number and is why the simulator does not use it.
→ Provenance: read from 2504.05660v1.pdf on disk, md5 7c00e7d4…. A cold reader gave this as “beyond ~320 km.” The paper says over 230 km; 320 km is one of the six tested fiber lengths in Table I, not the crossover. Corrected against the file.
→ USTC (Pan Jianwei’s group). Atom–atom entanglement between two atomic-ensemble quantum memories over 420 km of fiber, via the DLCZ scheme, with quantum frequency conversion into the telecom S-band to exploit “significantly low transmission loss in fiber (0.17 dB/km).” It is a real and hard result, and it is a memory-to-memory result — a different thing from distributing photon pairs down a deployed link.
→ Read the geometry before the number. The paper places the two memory nodes “all located at a laboratory in USTC,” and says “a pair of deployed fibers of 10.1 km are used to transmit write-out photons from two nodes to the middle node Charlie at Hefei Software Park.” So the 420 km is overwhelmingly coiled fiber on spools inside the building, not a link between two places. That is a legitimate way to measure loss and it is exactly how the paper presents it — but headlines like “China pushes quantum entanglement 4× to 260 miles across fiber” read as a network span, and it is not one.
→ Provenance, stated plainly: the preprint full text was read. The published Phys. Rev. Lett. version returned 403 and has not been opened here, so nothing is quoted from it and no rate or fidelity figure is printed on this page — those numbers were not reachable in a source this page opened. The paper’s own comparison point, a prior 404 km fiber entanglement distribution (Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 230801), is named here but was likewise not opened.
Stucki, D. et al. (2002). “Quantum key distribution over 67 km with a plug&play system.” arXiv:quant-ph/0203118
→ Cited on this page for one narrow thing: that quantum key distribution was being stability-tested over aerial cable in 2002, which is why this page makes no claim that aerial QKD began in 2018.
→ What it actually says. The abstract reports stability testing “under field conditions using aerial and terrestrial cables” plus a 67 km Geneva–Lausanne key exchange, and does not say which cable carried which. The full preprint text does: the aerial run was a separate test link at Ste Croix (8.7–23.7 km) — “we tested the prototype also over an aerial cable” — while the 67 km Geneva–Lausanne link ran under Lake Geneva. So 2002 is a real aerial-QKD data point, but it is not a 67 km aerial one, and this page does not imply otherwise.
→ Provenance, stated plainly: the preprint is now held on disk (0203118v1.pdf, md5 d982a4b9…) and was re-verified against it on 20 Sep 2026 — abstract first read 19 Aug 2026, full text 1 Sep 2026. Its opening sentence carries the claim outright: “We tested the stability under field conditions using aerial and terrestrial cables.”One detail worth having, since this page keeps two columns: the 23.7 km aerial configuration was the 8.7 km aerial run with a ~15 km spool inserted. Spooled and deployed have been mixed in the same table since 2002. The published New J. Phys. version has still never been opened here: five routes were tried across two sessions and all were blocked or robots-disallowed, so its volume and page numbers are deliberately not printed rather than reproduced unverified.
NIST (2026). “‘Spooky’ Particles Transit DC Suburbs, a Step Toward a Quantum Network.” Released 5 Aug 2026, updated 6 Aug 2026. nist.gov →
→ The plain-language companion to Shi et al., and the source for when the experiment actually ran: “In early 2025, special signals wended their way through a fiber-optic highway strung above the streets and sidewalks of the Maryland suburbs.” The paper itself gives no run date — only Received 3 February 2026. It is also where the stabilizer hardware is attributed: “These devices, developed by Qunnect…”
→ Read it against the paper, not instead of it. The release says “1,500 entangled photons per second”; the paper says pairs, and pairs is what this page uses. The release is also the place NIST volunteers the record it did not break: “a European group in 2022 distributed entangled photons over 248 kilometers of underground fiber.”
Time anomaly papers (Quantum Map · Toronto pin)
Angulo, D. et al. "Experimental Observation of Negative Weak Values for the Time Atoms Spend in the Excited State as a Photon Is Transmitted." Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/gjfq-k9dv · preprint arXiv:2409.03680 (2024)
→ University of Toronto. The retitle is the story. The preprint said a photon "can spend a negative amount of time in an atom cloud." Peer review turned that into "negative weak values for the time atoms spend in the excited state." That is a far more careful claim about a far more specific quantity, and the change is a free illustration of exactly what this page keeps arguing: go to the published version.
→ And the physics, stated properly. This page used to say the wavefront peak exits early "via the cross-Kerr effect," which fused two different things. The cross-Kerr phase shift is the probe; the quantity measured is the mean atomic excitation time. Negative group delay is decades old and is not the news. A negative excitation time is. Source for the Δt range used in the simulator.
→ Provenance: title and DOI verified. Volume and article number are not printed — no primary page opened.
Kletetschka, G. (2025). "Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics." Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences, doi:10.1142/S2424942425500045
→ The wild-card. Proposes a 6D manifold (3 time + 3 space). It is not a reading of the Toronto result — this page used to file it that way and that was wrong. The paper does not cite the Toronto experiment and does not concern it; its predictions are about collider constraints, LIGO speed-variation bounds and weak mixing angles. It sits here because it is the most aggressive thing anyone is saying about time right now, not because it explains anything on this page.
→ Provenance: title, journal and DOI verified from the publisher's own listing. The volume and article number are not printed here because no primary page for them could be opened — same rule applied to Stucki below.
Hossenfelder, S. (2024). Public commentary on the Toronto measurement.
→ The skeptic's read. Argues the negative time has nothing to do with the passage of time and is a description of how photons move through a medium and how their phases shift. She was responding to the Toronto work, not to Kletetschka — this page previously glossed her as rejecting "a new temporal dimension," which put her in an argument she was not in.
→ The more useful half, which was missing: Steinberg conceded the headline was provocative but noted that no serious scientist had challenged the experimental result. Result solid, wording contested. That is the actual state of play.
The case against — the institutional objection
NSA / CSS.Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Cryptography (QC).nsa.gov
→ Source for both NSA quotes in “The objection this page owes you.” Two different sentences, two different places, both verbatim:“does not recommend” is the Synopsis, “does not support” is the Conclusion. The five numbered technical limitations follow, the first being “Quantum key distribution is only a partial solution.”
→ Provenance: page capture held on disk (md5 383d3092…), quotes matched against it.
UK NCSC.Quantum networking technologies (5 Aug 2025 edition). ncsc.gov.uk
→ “The NCSC will not support the use of QKD for government or military applications” and “PQC is the best mitigation to the threat to cryptography from quantum computers.”
→ Version warning, stated because it will bite someone: the four-agency paper below cites this whitepaper at 24/03/2020. The edition read here is the 5 Aug 2025 one. NCSC revised it. If you check and find different wording, that is a version difference, not a fabrication — and the edition quoted here is the one named here. Capture held on disk, md5 e781e6ba….
ANSSI (FR) · BSI (DE) · NLNCSA (NL) · Swedish NCSA.Position Paper on Quantum Key Distribution.bsi.bund.de
→ Source for the niche-use-cases passage, the standardisation line, the “absolute/unconditional” line, the satellites-are-trusted-nodes line and the priorities line. Seven pages, read end to end, md5 5f1e5f52….
→ Two things a careful reader should know. First, the paper carries no printed date anywhere in its seven pages and none in its PDF metadata — the widely-quoted “26 January 2024” comes from the BSI landing page, not the document, so this page says 2024 and stops. Second, the paper states its priority twice, differently: the summary says “the clear priorities… migration to post-quantum cryptography and/or the adoption of symmetric keying,” while the body says “the clear priority… in hybrid solutions with traditional symmetric keying or classically secure public-key cryptography.” Both are real sentences. This page quotes the summary one and says which.
Huttner, B., Alléaume, R., Diamanti, E. et al. (2022). “Long-range QKD without trusted nodes is not possible with current technology.” npj Quantum Information8, 108. s41534-022-00613-4
→ This page cited it by its title. That was the exact error this page polices elsewhere, and it is corrected here. The title reads like a finding about the field. The article is a Comment, and its own abstract says what it is: “A recently published patent… has claimed the development of a novel quantum key distribution protocol… Here we present a straightforward analysis of this claim, and reach the conclusion that it is largely unfounded.” The patent is GB2590064, granted to Arqit Ltd, which the paper calls the ARQ19 patent. It is a debunk of one company’s protocol, not a survey verdict on long-range QKD.
→ And the disclosure, held to the same light as Shi et al.’s two pins away. Verbatim from the Competing Interests section of the copy on disk: “B.H. and F.F. are employees of ID Quantique, Geneva and ID Quantique Europe, Vienna, respectively, which have competing interests with Arqit in developing quantum communication technologies. B.T. is an employee of Thales Alenia Space, a joint Venture which invests in satellite quantum communications. BH is the inventor of several patents, both pending and accepted, in the field of space QKD.”Authors employed by a commercial competitor of the company whose patent they are rebutting. That does not make the analysis wrong — this page prints Qunnect’s role in the Shi paper on the same principle — but it does mean the paper is not a neutral referee, and it was being used as one here.
→ Provenance: read from s41534-022-00613-4.pdf on disk, md5 82e87f92…. A cold reader reports an Author Correction at npj Quantum Inf 8, 143 (2022) stating the original competing-interests declaration reported none. The copy held here already carries the disclosure quoted above and does not itself carry a correction notice, so the existence of that correction is reported, not verified — it changes nothing about the disclosure, which is quoted directly.
Standards & specs
1550 nm fiber loss: this model uses ~0.2 dB/km for deployed fiber plus a 5.6 dB field-hardware term (splices, patch panels, switches). The 0.2 and the 5.6 are Shi et al. 2026’s own decomposition of the one deployed link on this page; 0.2 × 62 km reproduces their 12.4 dB fiber term exactly. This page previously printed “~0.18 dB/km (ITU-T G.652.D)”, which was wrong twice over: 0.18 is a vendor/spool typical, and the ITU-T G.652.D cable-attributes table specifies 0.3 dB/km maximum at 1550 nm — the table’s other attenuation rows read, verbatim, “Maximum from 1310 nm to 1625 nm — 0.4 dB/km” and “Maximum at 1383 nm — 0.4 dB/km.”(The 0.4 is a range maximum, not a value at 1310 nm; a cold reader read it the second way, so the cells are quoted here.) That is a ceiling nobody designs to, not a working figure.
Real deployed link, measured: 18 dB end-to-end over 62 km — ~12.4 dB fiber attenuation plus ~5.6 dB of field splices, patch panels and switches (Shi et al. 2026). The spec line above is spool loss; a field link carries the connector budget too.
Toshiba QKD: documented ~Mbps at 50 km, ~kbps at 100 km
ID Quantique Cerberis: commercial deployment specs
Trusted-node efficiency: ~70–95% (varies by implementation)
Live APIs used
Open-Meteo — cloud cover & atmospheric conditions (free, no key)
Hidden ground station on the map: Tullahoma, TN — show me. That's not a real QKD facility. It's where Dr. Priya Sharma teaches PHYS 303 in the OPA universe — and where the photon survival story actually starts. And the reason it is Tullahoma, in the words of the twelve-year-old who picked it: “UTSI has it. Or Oak Ridge National Laboratory if you want the federal scale. UTSI is closer to me and the parking is better.” — Jackie, who chose Tullahoma (UTSI) as the canonical quantum-entanglement-repeater deployment site because the parking is better than at Oak Ridge.
And the other thing in Tullahoma, since it is the reason the pick holds up. Jackie’s argument was that you need “a ground operations base that already has the high-altitude testing infrastructure.” Tullahoma has two. UTSI is one. The other is the Arnold Engineering Development Complex at Arnold Air Force Base — an Air Force Materiel Command site that, in its own words, “operates more than 90 aerodynamic and propulsion wind tunnels, rocket and turbine engine test cells, environmental chambers, arc heaters, ballistic ranges, sled tracks, centrifuges and other specialized units” and can “simulate flight conditions from sea level to 300 miles and from subsonic velocities to Mach 20.”AEDC is not a quantum facility and is not a pin on this map. It is why a twelve-year-old picking a town for atmospheric relay work picked the right town — and it is where the “AEDC” in this station’s old label came from, before the canon was checked and it went back to UTSI. USAF fact sheet And one check nobody asked for, which is the kind this site is made of. The approach to Exit 117 on I-24 was walked sign by sign in Street View (imagery dated March 2026). The two green signs read “Arnold Air Force Base · Tullahoma · ¾ MILE” and “U T Space Inst · NEXT RIGHT.”“AEDC” is on neither one. Note what the signs actually name: the installation and the institute. AEDC is the organization headquartered at the base — an org chart, not a place — which is why it is on no highway sign and why nobody in Tennessee says it. The old label on this station used an internal acronym as if it were a place name, for a station whose entire point is that a twelve-year-old picked a town. UTSI is what the sign says, what the canon says, and what anyone who has driven it would say.
Where the instrument came from, and what it got right before it existed. This page is built from a 2025 design document — the Quantum Analyst Bundle, with its Quantum Time Anomaly Tracker wild card. Its two simulator modes were photon and qubit; they are the two tabs above. And it carried a section headed “Critical Eye” that this page took years to catch up to: it warned that the “revolutionary” three-dimensional-time framing “smells like media spin,” that negative time “might just be a measurement artifact (e.g., phase shifts, per Sabine Hossenfelder), not a new dimension,” and that the establishment would push back until the data carried it. It cited its own basis as “unpeer-reviewed prepapers” and named the arXiv ID. Every one of those cautions is on this page now, and every one of them was in the design document first. The drift was always away from the spec, never a gap in it — which is the entire argument this tool makes about reading sources instead of coverage, run against itself.
And the page at the other end of that link.whatjackiethinks.com is a periodic table where every element gets four questions — what it is, what it does, what it bonds with, and what Jackie thinks. The gold entries are hers; the rest are unwritten, because “fifteen left room for the sixteenth.” No ads, no login, under 1.2 seconds on a school Chromebook, and she would not negotiate on the 1.2 seconds. Two things from that page are the method this one runs on. On reading a 2026 paper about growing tellurium wires: “I can’t read every word yet. I’m thirteen. But I can read the diagrams, follow the pictures… The paper does the hard part. I do the wondering. We split it.” And on the element she visited but declined to claim: “I just visited it. The slot stays gold-less — that one’s not mine to claim.”That is the same rule this page applies when it prints a DOI but withholds a volume number because no primary page was opened. She got there first, and she got there at twelve. And the stamp in this page’s footer is hers too. Her page runs on PHINDEV, the trust gate from her own story — “human in the loop, no ads, no login, nothing optimized for the metric to climb” — and states the lineage plainly: “CLAUDEDEV is PHINDEV grown up — the same gate, matured into the build discipline credited on every page in the network.”The CLAUDEDEV mark at the bottom of this tool is the kid version, grown.
And the failure mode all of this exists to catch has a name. THE NET’s Memphis thread calls it GFAS — Good First Answer Syndrome: “Find one answer that fits, stop searching.” Its prescription, verbatim: “rotate the eyes, require a second set, mandate the uncomfortable method, document that you actually looked, audit the auditors. Never let the thing that checks itself be the only thing that verifies it.” The antidote is listed under several names — Marcus Williams’s Three Gauge Test, Jackie’s Critical Eye, George McIntyre’s external verification, the Sandcastle — and the thread reduces all of them to one question: “did you actually LOOK, or did you just confirm what you expected to find?” That is the whole reason this page reads the way it does. Every retraction printed here in the page’s own voice — the withdrawn 0.18 dB/km, the Nature result this page once miscalled a press release, the sentence that credited the wrong experiment — is a GFAS catch, and not one of them was caught by the hands that wrote it. A second set of eyes found each one. Jackie’s bundle carried the Critical Eye section in June 2025. This tool spent until 2026 catching up to it.
PHYS 303 · Photon Physics & Signal Propagation: Tennessee to LEO
"I launched 100 photons from Tennessee. One survived to 1,000 kilometers."
That's the PHYS 303 lab in one sentence. The simulator above runs the same physics — atmospheric scatter, repeater swap efficiency, geometric loss — on real published numbers instead of dialed-for-play ones.
PHYS 351 · Quantum Information & Space Communications
Cross-listed College IX / College X. Students use the Quantum Analyst Bundle (§4.9.5a) to simulate QKD across the Arsenal Corridor — Birmingham → Tullahoma (Arnold AFB) → Huntsville (Space Command). Real geography, fictional ground stations, real physics.
"Two sheets of atoms. When one spins, the other spins. The trick is keeping them coherent long enough to mean something."
The Qubit Lab tab is the PHYS 423 wet lab in one screen. Random initial parameters, five toggles, five moves, and the dominant noise channel is hidden — the same diagnostic-instinct trainer every working quantum engineer eventually develops. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree are the resident observers.
Luna "Lynx" Lee Rodriguez — Space Science (PHYS 351 cross-list)
Dr. Elena Rodriguez — Quantum Computing & Computational Memetics · Director, Quantum Mascot Computational Intelligence Research Center (PHYS 423 lead)
Dr. Samantha Chen — Computational Memetics · Chen-Beaver Entanglement Protocol (named against her will)
Dr. Michael Kawasaki — Applied Humor Theory · author, The Beaver Principle: Unexpected Intelligence
Dean Katherine Reyes — Computational Consciousness Studies · wears the pin every formal occasion
The two resident observers (Qubit Lab commentary)
🦫 The Beaver — distributed-consciousness teaching assistant. Speaks in ALL CAPS observations. Cannot be prompt-injected (turns injections into jokes). Optimal humor frequency: 21.82. Cohesion advice tends to be correct, even when the math looks like vibes.
🌲 The Tree — googly-eyed observer in a color that shall remain unspecified. Communicates by rustling, occasional dance. Pairs well with the Beaver. Solved a decade-old quantum computing problem mid-choreography once. Does not press you on the cardinal red.
This tool's slot
OPA §4.10.10 (Photons / Two Bets) + §4.9.5 (Time Anomaly Module) + §4.23.1 (PHYS 423 Lab) — all live in the ELUSK College of Engineering (Building 10), cross-listed across PHYS 303 / 351 / 423. The two-tab toy in your toybox (the Time Anomaly module now lives on the Quantum Map’s Toronto pin). The instrument that lives next to SnapBasin, QuakeSimulator, and Space Pulse.