Quantum communication for tomorrow

Beatrice Marie Ellerhoff

François Chapeau-Blondeau

William J. Munro, Nicoló Lo Piparo, Kae Nemoto

Quantum communication will be at the heart of tomorrow’s internet providing the foundation for them to coherently interact. Here we introduce the key concepts of quantum multiplexing, aggregation and routing for use in networks.

P. Forn-Díaz, Christopher Warren, C. W. Sandbo Chang +2 more

Single photons are expected to play a key role in tomorrow's quantum communication networks, owing to the robustness of photonic quantum states and their ability to travel long distances. This study demonstrates a generator that can give individual photons a desired ``shape'', which can increase their efficiency when used in a quantum network. Here the emission of an artificial atom (a superconducting circuit) is controlled by manipulating quantum vacuum fluctuations on nanosecond timescales. This tunable coupling principle could also see use in controlling quantum interactions in a variety of applications beyond single-photon generation.

William J. Munro, Nicoló Lo Piparo, Kae Nemoto

Tomorrows future quantum-internet will need to support a wide range of operations including those arising from quantum-communication, distributed quantum computation and quantum remote sensing tasks. Such applications require the transmission of quantum information across the network where channel losses are a serious problem. Here we introduce the concept of quantum multiplexing to reduce the severity of this issue where multiple-qubits of information are encoded onto each transmitted photon. We will show how one not only saves on the number of photons needed but also on the physical resources required within the network nodes. We will discuss the implementations of quantum multiplexing in various networking applications.