Quantum sensors have been named a top 10 emerging technology by the World Economic Forum in 2020. This is mainly driven by their imminent application potential and the ability to open up qualitatively new sensing areas, such as sensing into the ground, or seeing the brain at work. We are now just one step away from commercial breakthrough applications in civil engineering and clinical trials. With this success, the next step will be to develop integrated photonics components to open up mass markets in water, navigation and gaming. I will provide an overview of the working principle of an atomic quantum sensor and lay out the parameter needs for photonic integration.
Industrial technologies based on the production, manipulation, and detection of single and entangled photons are emerging, and quantum key distribution via optical fibre is one of the most commercially-advanced. The National Physical Laboratory is developing traceable performance metrology for the quantum devices used in these technologies. This is part of a broader effort to develop metrological techniques and standards to accelerate the development and commercial uptake of new industrial quantum communication technologies based on single photons. This presentation will give an overview of the work carried out at NPL and within the wider European community, and highlight plans for the future.
A new scheme sends large numbers of entangled photons reliably through commercial fiber-optic cables, demonstrating a capability required for secure quantum networks. By Charles Day Large-scale networks that distribute information among quantum processors or that use quantum encryption for the security of a large number of systems will require many pairs of quantum mechanically entangled photons per second.Sending these photons reliably through existing commercial fiber-optic communication lines is a challenge, given the fragility of entanglement.Now researchers have sent 20,000 such photons per second down a 34-km-long section of a New York fiber-optic network with a fidelity of 99% [1].They sent these photons continuously for two weeks without the frequent recalibrations needed in previous systems with lower photon rates.The researchers say that their results are an Quantum cable.A fiber-optic cable under New York City carried large numbers of quantum mechanically entangled photons with high fidelity, thanks to a system that continually compensates for disturbances of the photons' polarizations.Credit: tiero/stock.adobe.comimportant step toward the commercialization of quantum networks.