TEHRAN - Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said on Monday night that “Iran has started to develop quantum technology, because the 21st century is the century of this technology.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the open space quantum communication achievement, Salehi announced, “The quantum technology is very significant and that advanced industrial countries kicked off development in this technology from the onset of 21st century”.

“The Atomic Energy Organization began work on the quantum technology in 2016 and it is responsible for monitoring scientific developments throughout the world and prioritizing high tech technologies”, said Salehi, according to the IRNA. 

The technology intertwines photons and separates a pair of photons and then dispatches the photons to a chosen destination, Salehi, a nuclear physicist, stated, adding the photon, which remains in the first place, would be affected by the other photon that has been sent to the destination.

Iran’s nuclear chief also said that in 2019 the AEOI decided to carry out the experiment in farther distances, so the test was implemented at a distance of 2 meters, trying to increase the rate of photon generation, which ended up in the production of several million pairs of intertwined photons. 

Salehi added that the distance increased to 300 meters in June 2020.

He also announced, “The Atomic Energy Organization plans to increase the distance to seven kilometers between the location of the organization and Milad Tower in Tehran in next summer”.

He expressed hope that the AEOI will be able to utilize the quantum technology in order to transfer codified data in different fields, including in telecommunications, defense, banking communications, medical and computer sciences, artificial intelligence, atomic clock, radars, and biology.

“Iran is the first country in West Asia that has conducted the test and a few countries succeeded in investing in quantum technology, including Austria, the U.S., China, Russia, India, Britain, the European Union and Canada,” he explained.

EE/PA