Overview
- Wehner received the €1 million prize at a ceremony in Hamburg’s city hall, with the Körber-Stiftung citing her groundwork for a practical quantum internet.
- She plans to use the funds to develop applications that run on networked quantum devices.
- Her software layer enables quantum-network programs to run across different hardware without specialist rewrites.
- Current quantum links work over roughly 100 kilometers, and researchers are developing quantum repeaters with targets of about 500 kilometers by 2030 and 1,000 kilometers within a decade.
- Quantum communication promises eavesdropping detection and provable data deletion through entanglement and the no-cloning principle; Wehner leads the European Quantum Internet Alliance and is a TU Delft professor with a background as an ethical hacker.