University of Naples Federico II ERC QNattyNet
A story about the quantum internet

The most fragile package on Earth has a waiting problem

Quantum packages spoil fast.

The mail system that carries them is slow.

One new idea fixes this by letting the package help run the post office.

How can a package help run a post office?

Based on a research paper posted to arXiv on 5 Nov 2026 (arXiv:2611.08298).

An optical fibre carrying a laser beam in a physics lab
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Optical fibre carrying a laser beam, the glass road light travels on. Photo: NTNU, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. File page
Act 1 The old way

Today the parcel is quantum. The driver is not.

A quantum network moves fragile quantum states from place to place.

The parcel obeys quantum rules.

Every decision about where it goes is made by ordinary computer code.

This works. So where does it break?

Source: paper, Section 1. Also RFC 9340 (2023) on quantum internet design.

Women working at a Bell System telephone switchboard
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Operators connecting calls by hand, plug by plug. Photo: U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. File page
Obeys quantum rules

The parcel

The quantum state being sent.

Obeys ordinary rules

The driver

Maps, addresses, and every routing choice.

Act 1 The crack

Waiting is costly when your cargo is going bad

10 ms vs 1 ms
Round trip over 1,000 km vs 100 km of fibre

Quantum states fade as time passes. Physicists call this decoherence.

Even a quick "is the road clear?" reply has to cross the distance twice.

What if the network never had to ask?

Source: fading of quantum states, paper Section 2. Wait times are our own arithmetic: light in glass fibre travels about 200,000 km/s.

Act 2 The idea

Let the physics do part of the job

The paper calls this quantum-native networking.

The strange behaviour of the parcel stops being a problem to manage.

It becomes a tool the network uses. Ordinary computers stay on the job and get help.

What strange behaviour could a network use?

Source: paper, Section 1.

A laser experiment set up on an optical table
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Where light is split, steered and measured. Photo: US Air Force, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. File page
Act 2 Tool one: waves

Waves can add up. Waves can cancel.

Drop two stones in a pond. Where ripples meet, they pile up or flatten out.

Light is a wave too.

Two waves in step add up to a height of 2.0. Two waves out of step add up to 0.0.

What if one particle rode two waves at once?

Background physics (interference). The paper builds on this effect in Section 3.1.

Act 2 Tool two: two roads

One particle can take two roads at once

A beam splitter gives a photon two fibres to pick from.

It does not pick. It uses both.

Physicists call this spatial-path superposition.

What can a particle do with two roads?

Source: paper, Section 3.1.

Act 2 First payoff

The link can be made during the trip

Old plan: make the entangled pair first, then ship it.

With two roads, the pair can form while the particle travels.

Making and shipping stop being two separate steps.

And what happens to noise on those roads?

Source: paper, Section 3.1.

Act 2 Second payoff

Two roads can cancel each other's noise

When the two roads meet again, their waves recombine.

For several kinds of noise, damage on one road is cancelled by the other.

This is not the usual error-correcting code. It comes from the waves themselves.

A parcel on two roads has no single address. Now what?

Source: paper, Section 3.1.

Act 2 A new kind of address

A normal address picks one house. A quantum address keeps two open.

Today an address points to one place.

A parcel on two roads is not in one place.

A quantum address holds both candidates until the moment one is needed.

Next puzzle: must two cities be wired together to be neighbors?

Source: paper, Section 4. It adds to ordinary addresses and does not replace them.

Act 3 The turn

Far-away cities can become next-door neighbors

Cables give the network its physical map.

Entanglement draws a second map on top.

Two nodes that share an entangled pair act as neighbors, even with other nodes between them. The cables are still needed to build that pair.

Does this second map ever hold still?

Source: paper, Section 3.2 and Figure 1.

Act 3 The catch

The shortcut map redraws itself over time

An entangled link has a life.

It is made, shared, kept, reshaped and used up.

While it waits, it fades. So who counts as a neighbor changes with the clock.

Does the new map replace ordinary networking?

Source: paper, Sections 2 and 3.2 (the paper writes this map as GE(t)). The fade curve shows the shape of the idea, not measured data.

Act 4 The honest part

Ordinary networking stays on the job

Ordinary signals still carry measurement results.

They still manage cables and lasers.

The new tools sit next to them, not in their place.

So what is still unsolved?

Source: paper, Sections 1, 4 and 5.

An optical table with a doubled Nd-YAG laser and mirrors
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Lab hardware like this still needs ordinary control electronics. Photo: Giorgio Brida, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. File page
Ordinary plane

Carries and coordinates

Measurement results, link monitoring, the physical map.

Quantum plane

Does the new tricks

Two-road travel, quantum addresses, links that depend on entanglement.

Act 4 What comes next

Three questions nobody has answered yet

Some pieces are worked out already, such as routing over entanglement-made links.

Routing a path that is still "both roads" is not worked out yet.

So what changes in how we picture the internet?

Source: paper, Section 5 and Table 1.

Question 1

Routing

How do you pick a route when the path itself is still "both"?

Question 2

Control

Which choices must stay quantum, and which can be ordinary?

Question 3

Building blocks

How do you snap many quantum tools together without breaking what makes them work?

Act 4 The flip

The network was a road. It may also be a machine.

For years, a quantum internet meant a delivery service.

This paper asks for more: let the physics help steer.

A particle on two roads. Noise that cancels itself. Neighbors the cables never joined.

Next time you picture a network, picture the waves too.

Source: paper abstract and Section 5.

Before

The parcel

Cargo that the network carries.
After

The parcel

A part of the engine that moves it.
Optical fibre patch cables with connectors
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Fibre patch cables, the real roads of the network. Photo: Asurnipal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. File page
Sources and method

What came from where

Every idea about two roads, shared links and quantum addresses comes from the paper below.

Two things are ours: the wait-time arithmetic on slide 3 and the plain-language wave picture on slide 5.

Primary source

Beyond Quantum Messages: Toward Quantum-Native Network Functioning
A. S. Cacciapuoti, J. Illiano, C. De Risi, M. Caleffi. arXiv:2611.08298v1, 5 Nov 2026.

Related work cited in it

Quantum internet architecture: unlocking quantum-native routing via quantum addressing
M. Caleffi and A. S. Cacciapuoti. IEEE TCOM, 2026. doi:10.1109/TCOMM.2025.3650397.

Photos from Wikimedia Commons: NTNU (CC BY 2.0), U.S. National Archives (no restrictions), US Air Force (public domain), Giorgio Brida (CC BY 2.0), Asurnipal (CC BY-SA 4.0). Links are on each slide. Funding named in the paper: European Research Council grant QNattyNet, no. 101169850. Reporting: Vizmaya desk, November 2026.