A top Chinese military technology company shocked physicists around the world this week when it announced it had developed a new form of radar able to detect stealth planes 100km away.

The breakthrough relies on a ghostly phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein dubbed “spooky action at a distance”.

China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), one of the “Top 10” military industry groups controlled directly by the central government, said on Sunday that the new radar system’s entangled photons had detected targets 100km away in a recent field test.

That’s five times the “potential range” of a laboratory prototype jointly developed by researchers from Canada, Germany, Britain and the United States last year.

America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has reportedly funded similar research and military suppliers such as Lockheed Martin are also developing quantum radar systems for combat purposes, according to media reports, but the progress of those military projects remains unknown.

In a statement posted on its website on Sunday, CETC said China’s first “single-photon quantum radar system” had “important military application values” because it used entangled photons to identify objects “invisible” to conventional radar systems.

Nanjing University physicist Professor Ma Xiaosong, who has studied quantum radar, said he had “not seen anything like this in an open report”.

Read More: South China Morning Post

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