Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Remember the days when computers were giant rooms filled with machinery that took punch cards?

Or hunking squares of plastic that took floppy

disks, that's sort of where quantum computers are now.

Maybe even before that, there's still a dream.

But the era of quantum communication is here.

A new experiment out of Paris has demonstrated for the first time that quantum communication

is superior to classical ways of transmitting information.

Eleni Diamante is an electrical engineer and senior researcher at Sarbonne University, and a co-author of the result.

She says this applies to the best-known classical protocol.

A lot of people can claim that they have shown quantum advantage, right?

And it depends on where, in which resource you have shown the advantage.

We are the first to show an advantage for transmitted information,

so for the information the two parts have to share for a huge three task.

Quantum machines exploit quantum properties of matter to encode information.

They're widely expected to revolutionize computing.

But progress is slow.

While engineers labor to build rudimentary quantum computers,

theoretical computer scientists have confronted a more fundamental obstacle.

They haven't been able to prove that classical computers will never be able to perform the tasks

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