click two stations · live weather · representative Mozi-1 orbit · real published physics · joint pass windows
MOZI-1 · tracking…
⚛ What QuantumPulse is
Two tabs. Two real questions. Pick around.
Read this first. This is an exploration of the shape of quantum technology — not the physics itself. I’m not a quantum specialist and I’ve never claimed to be. Pretty much everything I know about quantum is right here in this toy: built from papers I half-read and half-understood, and math I mostly don’t. I just like the shape of it. Quantum scares a lot of people, and I figured if I could lay out the shape — what China’s satellite path is really doing versus America’s fiber path, where the real labs actually are — then at least the basics stop being a wall. It’s still advanced even at this level, but it’s the kindergarten version: a toy I learned on, the same way SnapBasin was my toy for water. If a real physicist looks at this and calls it junk — good. That means I drew the shape simple enough to see. Nothing here is certified by anybody of any caliber. So don’t trust it — do what Lester does and triangulate it yourself: read the Yin 2017 paper, the Liao 2018 paper, the Angulo 2024 preprint, click into the ~15 labs on the map, go play the Qubit Game. The right answer isn’t on this page; it’s downstream of you doing the looking.
The two tabs
Photons → LEO — a world map of real QKD ground stations. Click any two stations, the page computes which kind of quantum link survives between them and tells you why. Mozi-1 (the Chinese quantum satellite) traces a representative SGP4 orbit — the real Micius re-entered the atmosphere in January 2026.
Qubit Lab — a coupled bilayer qubit array with 5 toggles and 5 moves. Stabilize the array against decoherence. Each round has a hidden dominant noise channel; you can't see it directly, you have to read the toggles. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree are watching.
The two strategies underneath the Photons tab
The pins tell you where. The pairings tell you how:
🇨🇳 The Chinese satellite path. Entangled photons through ~10 km of atmosphere, bounce off Mozi-1 in vacuum, beam back down. Continental range but needs the satellite overhead AND dark sky on both ends. Yin et al. 2017.
🇺🇸 The Western fiber path. Photons through standard telecom fiber. Works 24/7 but you need a trusted node or quantum repeater every ~50–100 km. Toshiba and others.
Try this
On the Photons map, pair Beijing ↔ Vienna — see the Liao 2018 satellite intercontinental relay. Then pair Geneva ↔ Tokyo — see what fiber needs.
Click the 📍 Drop pin control top-left of the map and tap anywhere on Earth. Heads up: Mozi-1 re-entered the atmosphere in early 2026, so there are no passes left to catch — the pin points you to Space Pulse to do the same thing for the ISS, which is still flying.
Click Mozi-1 itself on the map — the popup shows its current position, AND it draws the last 24 hours of its ground track so you can see where it's been.
Switch to Qubit Lab tab. Expand the Quick primer at the top, read the four hints, then play a round. The trick is figuring out which toggle dominates from what you observe, not from what the page tells you.
The design target
This isn't a daily-driver. It's a teacher's lesson-plan aid + a curious person's 5-minute "huh, cool" + a builder's gut-check against the published physics. Click around, find what interests you, then go do something else.
A two-tab quantum bundle. One tool, two questions.
Tab 1 — Photons → LEO. A simulator for comparing the two real approaches to long-distance quantum-secured communication.
🇨🇳 The Chinese satellite play. Beam entangled photons through ~10 km of atmosphere, bounce off a satellite in vacuum, beam back down. Proven by Mozi-1 / Micius (2016–2025; the satellite re-entered the atmosphere in Jan 2026). Weather- and day/night-limited but spans continental distances.
🇺🇸 The Western fiber play. Send photons through standard telecom fiber. Every ~50–100 km you need a trusted node or quantum repeater. Works 24/7, no weather problem, but every hop is a chance to lose the link.
Where the negative-time demo went. The Angulo et al. 2024 rubidium-cloud “negative dwell time” experiment used to be a tab here; it now lives as an interactive on the Toronto pin in the Quantum Map sister tool.
Tab 2 — Qubit Lab. A coupled-bilayer qubit-array stabilization game. Five toggles (temperature, medium, polarity, spin axis, sheet coupling), five moves per round, random initial conditions, hidden dominant noise channel. The lesson is that the first toggle depends on what's actually limiting cohesion — and you can't see that directly. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree observe each move and the diagnosis at round end.
What's real here
Ground station locations are real published QKD facilities
Cloud cover and time-of-day come from live APIs (Open-Meteo, Sunrise-Sunset)
Mozi-1’s orbit is propagated via satellite.js from a representative current-epoch TLE (the real Micius decayed Jan 2026)
Loss models use published parameters (Yin et al. 2017; Toshiba QKD specs)
Distances are real great-circle calculations
What's approximated
The TLE embedded here is a representative orbit; for current ops-grade tracking use Celestrak
Atmospheric loss is modeled as cloud-cover-modulated; real Micius operations also depend on aerosol, turbulence (r₀), and satellite elevation angle
Fiber key rates are first-order; real systems have detector dark counts, finite-key effects, and protocol-specific overhead (BB84, decoy-state, MDI-QKD)
How to use it
Click any glowing station on the map. It becomes endpoint A. Click another — endpoint B. The right panel shows you both bets running live. Move the repeater slider to see when the fiber play scales. Watch what happens when one endpoint is in daylight or under cloud cover.
▸ A word from our sponsor · you chose to look
🥧⚛️
QUANTUM OATS
the Breakfast of Entangled Champions
Two bowls, infinitely correlated — pour one in Beijing and the other’s already soggy in Vienna. Now fortified with fiber (the 1550 nm kind). Error-corrected below the threshold of hunger. Objects in bowl are closer than they appear.
Where we eat the shape till we understand it.
Then we go try the math.
And if the math makes sense — we keep walking the path.
Endorsed by NULL the Penguin 🐧 · funded by curiosity · User Zero approved
There’s no cereal. There’s no sponsor. You just clicked an ad on purpose — the most quantum thing you’ll do today. That was the whole point. 🦄
Sources & References
Primary papers
Yin, J. et al. (2017). "Satellite-based entanglement distribution over 1200 kilometers." Science 356, 1140–1144.
→ The Delingha–Nanshan / Lijiang experiment. Source for 64 dB measured channel loss, ~5.9 pairs/sec.
Liao, S.-K. et al. (2018). "Satellite-relayed intercontinental quantum network." Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 030501.
→ Beijing–Vienna 7,600 km video call via Mozi-1 + ground networks.
Chen, Y.-A. et al. (2021). "An integrated space-to-ground quantum communication network over 4,600 kilometres." Nature 589, 214–219.
→ Beijing–Shanghai backbone integrated with Micius. 32 trusted nodes, 2,000 km fiber.
Time anomaly papers (Quantum Map · Toronto pin)
Angulo, D. et al. (2024). "Experimental evidence that a photon can spend a negative amount of time in an atom cloud." arXiv:2409.03680.
→ University of Toronto. Photons traversing a rubidium cloud, wavefront peak exits before the apparent entry time via the cross-Kerr effect. Source for the Δt range used in the simulator.
Kletetschka, G. (2024). "Three-dimensional time: a mathematically consistent framework for the unification of fundamental physics."
→ The wild-card interpretation. Proposes a 6D manifold (3 time + 3 space). Cited as one possible reading of the negative-delay result; controversial.
Hossenfelder, S. (2024). Public commentary on the Toronto measurement.
→ The skeptic's read. Argues the negative dwell time is a phase-shift artifact in a highly dispersive medium, not evidence of a new temporal dimension. The measurement is real; the interpretation is contested.
Hidden ground station on the map: Tullahoma, TN. That's not a real QKD facility. It's where Dr. Priya Sharma teaches PHYS 303 in the OPA universe — and where the photon survival story actually starts.
PHYS 303 · Photon Physics & Signal Propagation: Tennessee to LEO
"I launched 100 photons from Tennessee. One survived to 1,000 kilometers."
That's the PHYS 303 lab in one sentence. The simulator above runs the same physics — atmospheric scatter, repeater swap efficiency, geometric loss — on real published numbers instead of dialed-for-play ones.
PHYS 351 · Quantum Information & Space Communications
Cross-listed College IX / College X. Students use the Quantum Analyst Bundle (§4.9.5a) to simulate QKD across the Arsenal Corridor — Birmingham → Tullahoma (Arnold AFB) → Huntsville (Space Command). Real geography, fictional ground stations, real physics.
"Two sheets of atoms. When one spins, the other spins. The trick is keeping them coherent long enough to mean something."
The Qubit Lab tab is the PHYS 423 wet lab in one screen. Random initial parameters, five toggles, five moves, and the dominant noise channel is hidden — the same diagnostic-instinct trainer every working quantum engineer eventually develops. The Quantum Beaver and the Botanical Tree are the resident observers.
Luna "Lynx" Lee Rodriguez — Space Science (PHYS 351 cross-list)
Dr. Elena Rodriguez — Quantum Computing & Computational Memetics · Director, Quantum Mascot Computational Intelligence Research Center (PHYS 423 lead)
Dr. Samantha Chen — Computational Memetics · Chen-Beaver Entanglement Protocol (named against her will)
Dr. Michael Kawasaki — Applied Humor Theory · author, The Beaver Principle: Unexpected Intelligence
Dean Katherine Reyes — Computational Consciousness Studies · wears the pin every formal occasion
The two resident observers (Qubit Lab commentary)
🦫 The Beaver — distributed-consciousness teaching assistant. Speaks in ALL CAPS observations. Cannot be prompt-injected (turns injections into jokes). Optimal humor frequency: 21.82. Cohesion advice tends to be correct, even when the math looks like vibes.
🌲 The Tree — googly-eyed observer in a color that shall remain unspecified. Communicates by rustling, occasional dance. Pairs well with the Beaver. Solved a decade-old quantum computing problem mid-choreography once. Does not press you on the cardinal red.
This tool's slot
OPA §4.10.10 (Photons / Two Bets) + §4.9.5 (Time Anomaly Module) + §4.23.1 (PHYS 423 Lab) — all live in the ELUSK College of Engineering (Building 10), cross-listed across PHYS 303 / 351 / 423. The two-tab toy in your toybox (the Time Anomaly module now lives on the Quantum Map’s Toronto pin). The instrument that lives next to SnapBasin, QuakeSimulator, and Space Pulse.