雅思阅读 28: Spooky Signals Down the Pole（电线杆上的幽灵信号）

改编自 NIST（2026年8月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/08/spooky-particles-transit-dc-suburbs-step-toward-quantum-network

Reading Passage

A. Albert Einstein never liked the consequence of quantum mechanics he called "spukhafte Fernwirkung" — spooky action at a distance. It was, to him, a sign that the theory was unfinished, a placeholder for hidden variables that, once discovered, would make the spookiness go away. Two particles, once entangled, share a single quantum state: measure one and you instantly fix the outcome of a measurement on the other, even if they are on opposite sides of the galaxy. There is no signal passing between them in the ordinary sense; there is, rather, a single shared fact about the pair. Experiments have since confirmed the effect in laboratories time and again, closing one loophole after another, but laboratories are careful places — temperature-stabilised, vibration-isolated, darkened. In August 2026, researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that they had sent entangled photons through sixty-two kilometres of ordinary commercial fibre — the kind strung on poles above the Maryland suburbs — and that the entanglement had survived. The result is a small but concrete step toward a quantum internet.

B. What is a quantum network for? The promise rests on three distinct uses. The first is measurement. Two telescopes separated by thousands of kilometres, if their light could be entangled, would in effect become a single telescope of enormous aperture, capable of imaging an exoplanet as sharply as today's telescopes image a nearby star — enough to read the weather, perhaps, or to look for the spectral fingerprints of life. The second is sensing. Entangled sensors spread across a landscape could detect the tiny ground distortions that precede earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, because quantum correlations make the whole array more sensitive than any single instrument could be. The third is computation and communication. Linked quantum computers might one day solve problems too large for one machine, from designing new catalysts to simulating complex drugs; and, more prosaically, any eavesdropper on an entangled channel disturbs the state they measure, so the system detects the intrusion automatically, with no need for mathematical encryption that a future quantum computer might one day break. None of this is imminent. All of it depends on the same enabling technology.

C. The enabling technology is simply this: to carry entanglement between two distant places without destroying it. That is harder than it sounds. An entangled photon is a fragile thing. Even in a dark, temperature-stabilised laboratory fibre, it degrades with distance, scattering off imperfections in the glass, absorbing into impurities, and losing its phase as the fibre itself expands and contracts. Outside the laboratory the world is actively unkind. The NIST team used fibre that dangles from utility poles above busy suburban streets. It expands as the sun warms it by day and contracts as it cools at night. Wind shakes it. Birds land on it. Maintenance crews drive vehicles past it. Each of those motions changes the path length and the polarisation of the light travelling through, scrambling the very quantum correlations the experiment is trying to preserve. One of the researchers described the connection, with admiration, as about as bad a connection as you can possibly have outside a deliberately hostile laboratory.

D. The point of choosing such a bad connection was deliberate. A purpose-built quantum network, laid in buried conduit and temperature-controlled, would be enormously expensive and slow to deploy. If entanglement could be shown to survive on the fibre that already carries today's internet, the cost of a future quantum network would fall dramatically, because the physical plant would already exist. Working with the quantum-hardware company Qunnect and the Joint Quantum Institute, a partnership between NIST and the University of Maryland, the team generated entangled photons at NIST's Gaithersburg campus and routed them along the existing commercial fibre to the university's campus at College Park, some 62 kilometres away. The photons that arrived still showed the statistical signature of entanglement: the correlation between the two particles' measurements was too strong to be explained by classical coincidence, and it survived the jolt of the suburban route. The experimenters used active stabilisation to compensate for the polarisation drift caused by the moving fibre, but the entanglement itself was never lost. The result was reported in the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, alongside detailed measurements of how much of the entanglement was lost along the way and how much active correction was needed to recover it.

E. The experiment is a proof of principle, not a product. A single 62-kilometre link between two well-tuned laboratories is a long way from a city-wide quantum network, let alone a national one. Quantum repeaters — devices that extend entanglement across many links, the way internet routers extend packets across many wires, by storing and forwarding entangled states rather than simply amplifying the signal — remain at an early stage of development, and no one yet knows how to build them cheaply or reliably. But the NIST demonstration matters because it asks the right question. For a decade, quantum entanglement has been shown to survive in pristine laboratory fibres of a few dozen kilometres, laid by hand and monitored by graduate students. The harder question is whether it can survive on the same infrastructure that already carries ordinary data, strung on poles and shaken by wind. The answer, in the Maryland suburbs at least, appears to be yes — which is a reassuring thing to know, whether you are building a quantum internet or merely wondering whether the photons on the pole above your head are as spooky as Einstein feared. The gap between a 62-kilometre demonstration and a continental quantum network remains wide, but for the first time it looks like an engineering gap rather than a physical one.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. What a quantum network is actually for ii. Why Einstein disliked quantum mechanics iii. The hostile conditions of the real-world fibre iv. Running entanglement on the internet's existing cables v. Why the experiment is still only a beginning vi. The history of fibre-optic communications vii. How entangled photons are generated in a lab

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What did the NIST team send through the fibre? A. Ordinary television signals. B. Entangled photons. C. Physical parcels. D. Electrical pulses only.

6. Why is entanglement useful for secure communication? A. It travels faster than light. B. Any eavesdropper's measurement disturbs the state, revealing the intrusion. C. It is encrypted with a password. D. It cannot be measured.

7. Why did the team use pole-mounted commercial fibre? A. It is the best-quality fibre available. B. It tests whether a quantum network can reuse existing, unideal infrastructure. C. It is shorter than buried fibre. D. It was the only fibre in Maryland.

8. How far apart were the two endpoints? A. 62 kilometres. B. 620 kilometres. C. 6.2 kilometres. D. 62 metres.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Einstein coined the phrase "spooky action at a distance".
10. The fibre used in the experiment was buried in temperature-controlled conduit.
11. The experiment was reported in the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking.
12. The team received funding from a private telecommunications company.
13. Quantum repeaters are already widely deployed.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The experiment showed that (14) __________ photons can survive a 62-kilometre journey on ordinary commercial fibre, a key step toward a future quantum (15) __________.

答案与解析

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