By taking advantage of traits that are accessible only at the level of the individual particles, scientists are developing fundamentally new, powerful ways of sending and receiving messages: as quantum communication. The payoff is expected to be next-level: networks that are invulnerable to attack and vastly stronger connections between high-performance computers — this could enable solutions to the world’s most intractable problems. Researchers such as Elizabeth Goldschmidt, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, are developing all manner of maneuvers for managing photons as quantum carriers of information.